VB6 Viability for the future?

[datacraft]

VB6 is a great development platform and very attractive to use for current app development.

But how viable is it as a language to use for the foreseeable future?

I seem to remember trying to install VB6 on a Windows 7 platform but this was unsuccessful - ide not supprted etc.

Yet I come of this forum and it appears to be really alive with postings and activity which is great.

I have to migrate my legacy VB apps to the Win 7 and Win 8 platforms yet the investment in Visual Studio is starting to drag me down.

Advice on how much to invest in VB6 would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[Merrion]

My advice would be to not invest much.
Not because VB6 itself is going away in a hurry but because your time is probably better invested learning a language that supports things like parallel programming out of the box.

[dilettante]

VB6 has been legacy for some time, and it is now very late in the day to consider it if you don't already have a significant investment in it.

Microsoft's direction going forward is WinRT. VB6 has not been permitted to play in that arena at all. However neither has most of VS.Net, which makes it legacy now as well. There is a huge body of opinion on this:

Was .NET all a mistake?

Putting NET Framework behind me

Does .NET Have A Future?


... just to cite a few.


A lot of developers who don't live down at the "leaf upon the stream" level of Mort Coder are wrestling with the question of where to go when the Windows Company Town dries up. So far there are no obvious answers or mass migration you can follow.

Some hope to retreat to web applications, typically relying on fat JavaScript at the client side. Even Hejlsberg has thrown some weight behind this, having found a way to put his greasy fingerprints on it via TypeScript.

Some are making a gradual move to more open platforms such as Android, which is on the verge of breaking out as a strong contender on desktop PCs. Six reasons why Android PCs can be disruptive (to Microsoft).


So you can see there is no simple answer. And the legacy stuff will be there to deal with for years to come yet.

[techgnome]

To further that, I'd say it also depends on what you want to do... do you plan to make it a career? Do you plan to make a living off of it? If so, what kind of development do you want to do? It might also be advantageous to learn more than one language. VB might be my primary language but I also know PHP, C#, JavaScript, SQL, and a host of others. Some of it is simple exposure, I can bungle my way through if I need to, others I have actual practical experience.

Diversification.

-tg

[datacraft]

Thanks for that Dil...

I am being killed off because my legacy apps (which use 16 bit dlls) will not be supported beyond XP and this is scheduled for retirement in April.

I am daunted at the prospect of embracing Visual Studio and the considerable learning curve it entails.

It wouldn't be so bad if I had a buddy close by (North London, UK) who could fast track me to do this and I am advertising for that now.

I read a statement a few weeks ago that VB6 apps will be supported in Win 7, Win 8 ...... Win 9

A paradox

[dilettante]

VB6 applications run fine on Windows 7. They also work on Windows 8, but are excluded from its new WinRT environment where Metro/Modern "apps" live.

However Vista was the last OS supporting VB6 development. You can (and many do) make it work in Win7 and Win8, but it was never supported.


Even on 32-bit XP you can't use 16-bit DLLs from a VB6 program without some thunk mechanism.

One way is described in How To Call 16-bit Code from 32-bit Code Under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me but I can't be sure that works at all on Windows NT (which includes XP, Vista, etc.).

The more common way required an out of process server, in VB terms an ActiveX EXE. However I've only heard of that going the opposite way (16-bit host calling into 32-bit code).

Are you sure you are really using 16-bit DLLs? That seems unlikely, and at best unusual.

[dilettante]

Digging around I find that some people do limp along to call a 16-bit DLL from 32-bit VB6 by creating a 16-bit ActiveX EXE wrapper using VB4.

That method will work fine even as late as Windows 8 as long as it is 32-bit Windows 8. However starting when Vista came out in 2006 most consumer and even business PCs shipped 64-bit editions of Windows. I guess it helped manufacturers keep prices high as the cost of electronic components dropped.

[dw85745]

I'm with techgnome. It all depends what is your personal objective.
If your programs work under XP, why not continue to run these programs on XP.
Why are you ungrading to Vista, Win7, etc. just because Microsoft says it is better and want to sell a new OS?
Do you need all the new bells and whisles in the new OS for your programs to work?
Remember the objective is to get input into memory and output out from memory -- period.
Any language will accomplish this, the question is which one you want to use.
If you think about it Classes are wrappers around APIs, and APIs are wrappers around the message stream.
I for one (I started with Fortran and COBOL) think NET and most OPP based programming is bloated.
Why does a program need to be 60 megabytes (in NET for example) when you can accomplish the same thing in 3 megabytes (in VB classic).
So first figure out your reason for what your doing, then make your decision.

[dw85745]

I'm with techgnome. It all depends what is your personal objective.
If your programs work under XP, why not continue to run these programs on XP.
Why are you ungrading to Vista, Win7, etc. just because Microsoft says it is better and want to sell a new OS?
Do you need all the new bells and whisles in the new OS for your programs to work?
Remember the objective is to get input into memory and output out from memory -- period.
Any language will accomplish this, the question is which one you want to use.
If you think about it Classes are wrappers around APIs, and APIs are wrappers around the message stream.
I for one (I started with Fortran and COBOL) think NET and most OPP based programming is bloated.
Why does a program need to be 60 megabytes (in NET for example) when you can accomplish the same thing in 3 megabytes (in VB classic).
So first figure out your reason for what your doing, then make your decision.

[dilettante]

The issue for a lot of people is that XP becomes an official dead duck as of April 2014. So far the plan is to stop providing updates including security fixes.

If you've waited this long then Windows 8 (er, Windows 8.1, no, soon Windows 8.1.1) is the only game in town. Retail sales of Win7 stopped as of last October. Once remaining stock sells out it is gone forever.

That doesn't mean XP won't run. People are still running Windows 95! But it isn't really viable, and XP users already are running into trouble since a lot of software vendors have already dropped XP as a supported OS.

[dilettante]

If you think about it Classes are wrappers around APIs, and APIs are wrappers around the message stream.

[yogiyang]

Hello,

It is better to learn something that support multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, etc.

I am currently playing with one such tool called Xero Coder (http://xerocoder.com/). It is unique in the sense that it supports Basic dialac as well as C++ and Pascal along with Java.

So you get to use multiple languages in one dev tool and its IDE is available for Windows, Linux and OS X. Further more it has facility to compile your code to generate a stand along app for multiple operating systems.

Yes it is not that mature as VB6 but it does have unique features that will allow one to target multiple platforms from one single code base.

Do check it out!

HTH

Yogi Yang

[datacraft]

Well, if any of you guys reading this thread you are from the UK, or more specifically North London, and you have embraced Visual Studio Basic and would like to share some ideas with me then please read the other post I made while looking for VB Buddies....

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...ters-Bar-etc-)

[dilettante]

Since 1998 all versions of Visual Basic were Visual Studio products. You probably mean VB.Net though.

[datacraft]

Since 1998 all versions of Visual Basic were Visual Studio products. You probably mean VB.Net though.

You can see that I need help!