Campaign to save Visual Basic 6 gathers support (Rapid obsolescence...of workforce?)

InfoWorld ^ | March 10, 2005 | Paul Krill

[baseball_fan]

An online petition gathering signatures to save Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 programming language will not change the company’s intention to cut free support on March 31, a Microsoft representative said on Thursday afternoon.

Microsoft’s plan to stop support has been discussed for almost three years and the deadline already has been extended once, said the press representative, who requested anonymity. Visual Basic 6 has been supported longer than any other Microsoft product, according to the representative. “Extended” support, which is fee-based, will continue through 2008.

The vendor has spent the past few years encouraging Visual Basic 6 programmers to migrate to the new Visual Basic .Net platform, which has had its share of complications. The Microsoft representative acknowledged that the company “dramatically altered the Visual Basic language-syntax in Visual Basic .Net.”

As of Thursday afternoon, 1,009 signatures had been added to the petition, at http://classicvb.org/Petition/. One signatory interviewed stressed the difficulties in moving to Visual Basic .Net.

“It’s a different language,” said Visual Basic programmer Don Bradner, who has been part of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Programmer community. “It’s like me telling you that you have to write InfoWorld in French.” …

The petition asks that Microsoft further develop Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic for Applications, continue supporting the language, and allow customers to decide when to migrate code to Visual Basic .Net. An updated version of Visual Basic 6 is requested by the petitioners…

“Microsoft should demonstrate a commitment to the core Visual Basic language. This core should be enhanced and extended, and changes should follow a documented deprecation process,” the petition states.

But all future versions of Visual Basic will be based on Visual Basic .Net…The company has provided “a wide range of resources to help Visual Basic developers make the transition…

[Bush2000]

I would like to salute Microsoft's development team for finally finding a way to rid the industry of VB programmers. It's a giant step forward for us all.

Oh, Nick. Stick to things you know about. Like cheerleading for IBM for selling off its PC business to the ChiComs, theft of American IP, and destruction fo American markets... yeah, that's the ticket! /SARCASM

[nmh]

Upper management won't care about this:

"Oracle does allow for recursive retrieval if an explicit 'path' approach is not used."

It's always been that way.

[nmh]

You are beginning to sound like an entitled liberal.

No one owes you a pay check.

No one needs to appease you.

No one cares if you don't like the new product or upgrade.

You are very replaceable, at a cheaper rate.

Programming and database work is not rocket science.

Be happy you have a job or if you don't like the company, or your manager etc. leave and work for someone else. To work in technology, you are required to keep up with the latest. If you can't then leave the profession. You'll be a happier person and so will others around you.

Whatever you do, end this ENTITLEMENT mentality. You sound like a whiny liberal.

[Dominic Harr]

Harr, I won't soon forget that thread in which you asserted that representing RSA-public-key-encrypted data as text was "insecure".

"Insecure"? That certainly doesn't sound like a quote from me, are you sure about the quote marks?

I did say NO encryption system is uncrackable, especially when considering that the people involved are the weakest link -- you, in that thread, said that Kerberos *was* uncrackable, and reliable. Hence our disagreement.

Y'know, I've always wondered -- why do you seem to prefer 'flames' to actual conversation?

[Southack]

"Hmmm...So when the automobile came into being and the buggies were no longer compatible, you're saying everyone should still be driving around in horse-drawn buggies? If you write ANSI C++ code, it should still compile."

You've misdiagnosed the situation. Even if you wrote your VB code precisely to MicroSoft standards, then it *still* won't compile in VB.Net.

VB.Net isn't backwards compatible; MicroSoft broke the chain. That's like a new C++ compiler that can't compile C++ code from last year. Code written precisely to standards in *any* earlier version of VB won't work in the new VB.Net.

Can you imagine what Java developers would say if a new Java engine couldn't handle Java code that was written to industry standards last year?! Well, that's what VB developers are saying about VB.Net.

Nor is this like the horse and buggy; this is more like last year model cars versus this year model cars, except the new MicroSoft cars won't run on the highways that you built last year because they aren't backwards compatible. You have to build all new highways to run the new MicroSoft cars.

[Malsua]

Many of these 3rd party drivers do not support VB.Net

You said it. I deal with proprietary equipment as well and some hardware vendors do only provide a VB interface to their equipment beyond a canned test/sample app. I generally need to just parse data from a 400 and send data down to a controller. In the process I send and read I/O to PLCs which handle motion controls. VB does this sort of this very easily and efficiently. I have applications that run constantly in a production environment without issue.

All that said, if I can do something in C++, VB.net or C# and the result is better, I'll code it in that. For simple little front-end apps VB6 works just fine if all you need to do is drop in an ActiveX object and send it some data.

As others have stated, the VB.net migration tool for VB6 code is pathetic. It's easier and cleaner in my opinion to just rebuild it in VB.net if there's a need.

I'm kicking around with moving everything over to pure Java, but as always, it's a function of time. Linux with Java front end applets controlling equipment could be the ticket.

[Bush2000]

"Insecure"? That certainly doesn't sound like a quote from me, are you sure about the quote marks?

Yeah, you certainly said it.

I did say NO encryption system is uncrackable, especially when considering that the people involved are the weakest link -- you, in that thread, said that Kerberos *was* uncrackable, and reliable. Hence our disagreement.

Allow me to refresh your memory. We were discussing web services. You complained that, since the protocol layer for web services is SOAP, that the content could be compromised. I said, no problem. Just use SSL. I then said that you didn't really even have to use SSL, if you didn't like, because you could simply use RSA public key encryption to encrypt the content of the SOAP packet. The encrypted data could then reside inside the SOAP envelope and pass through networks without fear of compromise. To which you complained that representing encrypted data as text was fundamentally insecure. See, you didn't like web services because MS was pushing them big-time, many companies were becoming interested, and your buddies at Sun Microsystems were trying to poo-poo web services for Java because they didn't invent them. So, you made up a pile of stinkin' crap about weak encryption in an attempt to make web services seem unviable. Which was nonsense. I pointed out that protocols such as SSL and Kerberos are used every day to provide an adequate amount of security for millions of transactions per day; then, you erected a strawman, saying that no protocol was crackable (something that I had never arged against, in the first place) and, therefore, nobody should to Web-based transactions. What a joke. Seriously, you should leave the deep-thinking to the big boys. You just aren't cut out... Y'know, I've always wondered -- why do you seem to prefer 'flames' to actual conversation?

[Bush2000]

that should read "no protocol was uncrackable "

[Golden Eagle]

Sounds like a great business opportunity for someone to come in and offer support at a reasonable fee for these older development tools, if there's such a great market for it.

Unfortunately, it looks more like whining that Microsoft support will no longer be "free". But as far as I know, no decent support is.

Didn't Red Hat completely strand their users for "Red Hat Linux", without even offering pay-as-you-go support a few years ago? I don't remember much outcry then...

[sevry]

to MSDN and tell me that the documentation is "crippled

Crippled and incomplete. Absolutely. You did read that other message, of course? Yes?

[sevry]

It's always been that way.

Recursion in Oracle? I thought that was a fairly recent addition to allow just for the use of such adjacency lists?

[sevry]

No one owes you a pay check.

Then tell it to the people I mentioned, a few of whom probably vote GOP and call themselves, conservative. Go figure.

No one cares if you don't like the new product or upgrade.

That's the impression Microsoft gives. And I said, look to the competitive marketplace. There are consequences for their behavior in this, even if it's just appearance. Already people fear Microsoft, and look to a 'hope', in something like a UNIX variant, or Firefox, or what have you.

Programming and database work is not rocket science.

Rocket science is far easier, I would suspect. They have standards and standard interfaces. I doubt they have to debug some 'clever' code by someone who even if he could be found probably couldn't explain what he did. Anyway.

Be happy you have a job

So it IS the 1930s, again? People keep arguing with me on this. But you kind of make the point.

end this ENTITLEMENT mentality

End it, indeed. But I'm suggesting who feels entitled. And they have jobs, and many don't have to work in them. They still get paid, and paid good money. But you don't want to end that. You don't find any fault with Raines and how he left things. But I find fault with him, and with you for not seeing the corruption, and the bad example he set. I'm sorry.

[Bush2000]

Example, please?

[Bush2000]

Didn't Red Hat completely strand their users for "Red Hat Linux", without even offering pay-as-you-go support a few years ago? I don't remember much outcry then...

Well, GE ... it isn't as much fun for the OSS bigots to shoot their sacred cows...

[Bush2000]

As others have stated, the VB.net migration tool for VB6 code is pathetic. It's easier and cleaner in my opinion to just rebuild it in VB.net if there's a need.

The languages are fundamentally different. Completely different paradigms. It's no wonder that the tool has limited capability.

[Southack]

"Sounds like a great business opportunity for someone to come in and offer support at a reasonable fee for these older development tools, if there's such a great market for it."

The business opportunity that exists would be for a 3rd party to write their own compiler that would work on old VB code as well as include new VB.Net features (or other new enhancements).

But it's probably safe to say that MicroSoft isn't going to sell the code and rights to the VB 6 engine, simply because in no time flat whoever purchased said engine could, with very few enhancements, knock VB.Net out of the picture.

VB.Net's lack of VBA compatibility with major business applications such as Excel, Autocad, Access, and MS Word, as well as its lack of automatic error detection and correction architecture, when combined with VB.Net's lack of backwards compatibility with code from all previous versions of VB...makes for a tempting target.

Would VB 6 shops go for a 3rd party VB 6.5 compiler? Absolutely. VB.Net makes for a poor competitor to almost any enhanced VB 6 compiler imaginable.

[Allan]

Ah, but did you ever boot up from a PAPER TAPE drive?

Wrote my first my first program on paper tape on an LGP-30 in 1960.

Now trying to upgrade from VB6 to VB-NET.

After 45 years this upgrading business gets a bit tedious.

Maybe someday they will settle on a language and leave it alone
so we can spend our time programming not upgrading.

But that probably will be in another 450 years.

[nmh]

YOu really are dense or perhaps you like to take my words out of context? Either one is a poor reflection on you. If you are like that here on this forum, God only knows what you are like at work. I'd have an up to date resume handy, if I had your attitude.

[econjack]

Two points:

First, the degree that VB6 code doesn't compile on VB.NET depends in large measure how you wrote it. A lot of my code ported over with little or no change. The changes that were required were often global search-and-replace edits that were easy to do. True, some things are harder than others, but still not a big job if you designed and wrote clean code in the first place.

Second, to me, moving from a non-OOP language to a fully-compliant OOP is an order of magnitude shift. In my mind, they are fundamentally different and I would expect some difficulties in moving from one version to the next. Recall the furor when moving from release 3 to 4.

[sevry]

Example, please?

A is greater than B? Wha? What example? When you reply, quote the relevant bit.