Wallace B. McClure

Sheesh. MBA's. =)

The point your blog misses is that Microsoft has not only dropped VB6, but also hasn't provided a usable upgrade path.

To ask for one is not either pro- or anti-NET. It has nothing to do with .NET at all.

To accept that Microsoft can get away without providing an upgrade path should be a worry to you. The key people in the developer tools division at Microsoft seem to have lost sight of the concept that a language and a platform are two separate things.

Platforms come and go. What will you do with the code you have written and need to maintain when the .NET platform goes and Microsoft abandons the languages that formerly targeted it? Of course, it will still be available for a while even after Microsoft stops selling it, so people will tell you "VB.NET hasn't gone away, carry on coding in VB.NET". But the time will come when modern platforms no longer support the latest version of the framework you can still compile to. At or before that point, you will be faced with abandoning all your code and starting again in a new language.

If anything, as a programmer in a new and untried language without any track record in long-term stability, it would be in your interest for the petition to succeed, simply to concentrate the minds of the people at Microsoft on the need to allow developers and application owners to preserve and manage their code assets, lest Microsoft pull the same trick on you in some years time.

So how about a signature from you?

We have thousands of users of a VB6 "classic" app that sells for big bucks. It will be cost prohibitive if not virtually impossible to port it 100% to VB.NET, not to mention all the third party hardware/interface stuff we have to support with drivers and APIs that are not updated or not compatible and that rely on serial I/O.

VB.NET is great for server based applications. Not so much for apps that run on clients that have serial ports and specialized hardware hanging off of them and where you track and react to every keystroke for high-performance transaction driven UI and so on.

What's the big deal about having VB6 and VB.NET in the IDE? When I start a project now I have a choice of C++, C#, J#, or VB. What's one more option?

I'm still mainting a large VB6 app in late 2007 that would be cost prohibitive to rewrite. I'm not at all happy ms chose to dump the language.

2009 and still maintaining and upgrading several VB6 apps because the clients can't afford to refactor to .Net.  As a developer MS basically screwed me.  It's hard to explain to your clients that MS decided to deprecate the platform on which their core business tools are developed... you are seen as having made poor choices in the first place and I lost several clients over it.  As a result I moved off MS tools completely outside of what I need to do legacy wise.  It was an eye opener for me and taught me not to put everything in one bucket.  We now develop cross platform tools easier in Java/Perl than we did Win apps before.  I thank Microsoft for making me realize they were a bad choice as a development environment as they weren't going to sick with you long term.

2010 and still using VB6 for apps that run in WinPe because Microsoft, as usual, stick their heads in the sand when we all ask for .NET support in WinPE.

Lastly, VB6 was great. It was not the unstable, horrible language everyone said it was. What made it unstable was basically bad programming using badly written or inappropriate API calls.

Back in my day, people complained about VB apps because they had to copy the "huge" runtime DLL onto their hard drive. How Ms ever got us to all to install the leviathan that is the .NET Framework I'll never know...