VB Classic (A True VB 7.0)

[WhyWontIEdieAlready]

@schmidt

Oh, that sucks :-(

If it does not turn up, could you at least post the essence of your thoughts? Contrary to dee-u I think this is an important discussion - event though it's a topic that got heated rather quickly.
Also, for the record, I think that even a VB7 without support for OCX-Controls and Active-X-Dlls would be a good thing, but it does not seem to be a viable option for a lot of existing projects. But from my standpoint it would not help my current situation that much without said support.

I am also not sure why you think that OCX/ActiveX support is a bad idea. Yeah, it may break in the future, but it would help with converting projects today.

Let's compare:

VB.NET does support OCX/ActiveX DLLs but did not support an easy way to port the source without major code changes.
The VB7 you suggest would allow easy porting of code but would not allow OCX/ActiveX integration.

Both is a big problem for me.
With VB.NET I would need to rewrite about 250k Lines of Code - I just cannot afford that.
With a VB7 without OCX/ActiveX support I would have to port all of our own components and libraries to another component model or make them static and also I would have to search replacements for several 3rd party libraries that are used for some critical features. That is something I also cannot afford.

So, yeah I think VB7 is a good idead - event without OCX/ActiveX support. But wihtout that support it would sadly be not an option for me (and I think for a significant number of other developers).
I still would appreciate it and certainly would have a look and maybe start new projects in VB7 because having an open source IDE/Framework/compiler for a langauge I am more than familiar with is still a good thing - but not for my existing stuff that needs to be maintained for the foreseeable future.

As I see it: If we had VB7 with OCX/ActiveX support we could port our projects now and hopefully enough 3rd party developers would support that system natively (without ActiveX) so that when and if the time comes and Microsoft pulls the plug on ActiveX we would be ready.

Dominik