VB6 is DEAD!

[jayinthe813]

Exactly so all this talk about what to move to next needs to be taken in the correct context. I know i personally we will continue to do Desktop development for many many years yet, probably with the same tools we are using now with a few updates.

That doesn't mean we are ignoring web & mobile we are already doing that as well as the desktop development.



In many cases it is a waste of time it just depends is the correct answer.

We have some VB6 systems that we will never ever re-write, they do the job and re-writing them wont give us anything extra, but were it makes business sense we will happily re-write.

For instance we have one particular system currently which i have inherited which is about 50/50 VB6 and .Net and i am converting it entirely to .net. Why? well for a few reasons,

- the VB6 parts of it are very old, not very well written and full of bugs, the .Net code is better written (non of it written my me i might add)

- The main App is VB6 but an increasing number of its components are written in .net as Controls and its a pain to debug and maintain. We are finding we spend significantly more time on maintenance on this system than any other we look after and a good part of that is the time it take to debug, maintain, rebuild and test the various components between the 2 languages.

- We are starting to have issues with things like Printing for this system with the VB6 components on environments like the latest Citrix.

For me it is drivers like this that determine a re-write or not, not because i can do it in a newer language which i might prefer to write in.



Depends on which way you mean it, .Net up to now has had development on its IDE,Tools and Framework that VB6 has not had for a number of years now, but if you mean going forward will it continue to and will it then be in the same boat as VB6, i.e still supported but not developed? then probably but who cares? as long as i can do what i want with it then i am happy.

If i cant then we will look at other tools.

So what will businesses do in the future for desktops once .NET becomes deprecated? Will most businesses be Ok with a framework that will most likely not be officially supported or updated by MS? It sounds like MS is banking on coralling businesses into what THEY want businesses to do. I cannot see a lot of businesses instantly going cloud, especially with sensitive data and needs.

It just makes me start to think that I need to look at another language that will be viable in 10 years (maybe c++). We are just now using sharepoint, but find it to be slow and less-featured compared to older software that we have had for years.