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…

[freedumb2003]

Then, when you're told to upgrade you discover that the app won't run on the new machine, the developer that created it and understood it left 2 years ago, and you are not quite sure where the latest version of the source code is.

They have a technical term for this: Bad Management.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of these things were written by undisciplined children. Those of us from the old Mainframe days learned one very important thing: Discipline. When I see the crap that gets tossed into the enterprise written by "programmers" who don't even do strong typing, I shake my head.

And near as I can tell, they still don't teach Operational or Production Discipline today. I have to retrain every kid that has been programming less than 10 years.

[sevry]

you like to take my words out of context

Not at all. I'm saying that there are consequences for Microsoft's willingness not to provide any backward compatibility, and particularly if the new technology is seen as weak or lacking and unable to perform functions that customers require. They'll find something else, and hold to the old, in the meanwhile. Makes sense, right?

[freedumb2003]

Remember tring to sort out SS instructions from the hex dump?

Don't forget XR to zero out a register.

R1 as a pointer to the parameter list, R13 as the pointer to the savearea, R14 for the return address R15 as the jump address.

Ahhh, those were the days.

[Golden Eagle]

Crippled and incomplete. Absolutely.

Microsoft is far from a perfect company, but their online documentation and developer network is the best in the business. I haven't read all your posts, but calling MSDN "crippled" is suspect. Exactly who do you claim is better? And from your tone, there must be several.

Already people fear Microsoft, and look to a 'hope', in something like a UNIX variant, or Firefox, or what have you.

Record profits, every single quarter. Dell, HP, even IBM claim to "recommend Microsoft Windows" all over their websites. Doesn't sound like people are hiding under their desks to me.

Rocket science is far easier, I would suspect.

Than programming? Hilarious. We have lots of people giving away sofware, I don't know of anyone giving away free rocket designs.

I'm suggesting who feels entitled. And they have jobs, and many don't have to work in them.

Giving into the lazy freeloaders just makes the problem worse. I'm glad to see on this point we agree (I think).

[Golden Eagle]

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

Sure isn't. Did you see that thread yesterday where Bloody Sam coudln't get his Firefox download to work and instantly jumped to the conclusion it was somehow Windows XP Service Pack 2? How in the hell you could ever make that relationship as your first guess, I'll never know.

[nmh]

Me: No one owes you a pay check.

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

Me: I don't need to "tell anyone" that. It's OBVIOUS! Perhaps it is YOU who is not the "conservative". Maybe DU would fit you better. They too have the entitlement mentality and expect others to give them a pay check without asking for much on their behalf.

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

You: 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.

Me: Yes that is typical. Why don't YOU look to the competitive market place. Yes. Microsoft has crap for products and yes others are looking for a replacement. So why not form your own company and do something about it. Direct your energy to something positive instead of whining?

Me: Programming and database work is not rocket science.

You: 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.

Me: Bull! I used to be a programmer and then database work and then management. NONE of it is "rocket science. Who I used to always pity was the maintenance people and the ugly spaghetti code. Still it is a CHOICE to do that. People who don't want to move on or learn by default get the crap work.

Me: Be happy you have a job

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

Me: Some Indian will gladly take your job for about a 1/3 or 1/2 your salary through a contract with NO benefits. No it is not the 1930's. You're just feeling sorry for yourself and walling in it. You will not get woe is me sympathy from me.

Me: end this ENTITLEMENT mentality

You: 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 ind fault with him, and with you for not seeing the corruption, and the bad example he set. I'm sorry.

Me: Who is "they"? Upper management? LOL! They live and die by the numbers. You otoh don't want to change, learn something new and full of class envy for people that have a hell of allot more stress than you could ever deal with. If THIS makes you whine, you have no idea what upper management has to deal with. Think Raines will get a sterling reference? LOL! Word gets around. It's a small world. If it was a woman, then she might get picked up because the person is a woman. Look at HP. The only reason she was there was because she was a woman. Finally they got the courage to get her out before she totaled the company. It's unlikely that she'll head something more than a charity or "non profit" if she is lucky.

If you're really sick and tired of it consider academia. I know a guy that sounded allot like you ... he finally threw in the towel took a few tests, got certified and now teaching a university. That's driving him nuts too but he has more time off, less work time and feels like he has more control of his life. Maybe this is something for you to explore. BTW, he had a PHD. I don't know where you stand on that but degrees in academia play a large part on determining salary.

[Southack]

"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."

Not true.

Any professional VB 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 code written to any published industry standards will include error detection and correction routines that are incompatible, by design, with VB.Net's new architecture.

That's not a global edit/search-and-replace; that's fundamental recoding of your large corporate projects' architectures (meaning, new designs or at the very least new design reviews).

It means that all of your original object, module, application, project, and system testing must be redone, too.

New coding. New architectures. Full system re-testing. All of the above is *mandatory* for all serious "upgrades" of existing VB 6/5/4/3/2/1 applications under VB.Net.

After you complete all of the above, by hand (no automated tool can do the above for you), you are then granted the same functionality as you had in those applications prior to upgrading to VB.Net.

That's an enormous amount of effort for *zero* user-visible enhancements.

Oh, and your VBA integration is also screwed under VB.Net. That impacts your corporate interactions with such daily high-use programs as MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, and Autocad, among others.

For organizations with large amounts of frontline, daily-use VB code, VB.Net is a counter-productive nightmare.

For individual programmers, especially those who write little tiny test applications that rarely get used by anyone besides the programmer herself, VB.Net's migration from VB 6 code may occasionally appear tame; for everyone else, it's a beast...a cost-adding, time-wasting monster.

[Psycho_Bunny]

I evaluated .NET when it first came out and determined that the cost-to-benefit ratio was way too high for our company.

We still use VB6 because it doesn't require a bunch of ridiculous, cascading upgrades to our software infrastructure.

There are a lot of companies out there that could, of course, benefit from the upgrade but, by and large, I think they're the minority.

Personally,  I think the .NET "upgrade" is a scam similar to the DAO/ADO scam MS pulled a few years ago.

Besides, the .NET platform is kudge.  Who want to slow their networks down with it?

 

 

[Psycho_Bunny]

So MicroSoft has now broken backwards compatibility twice?! For VB 6 to VB.Net and for C++ when they rewrote their Foundation Classes...

Don't forget ADO breaking backwards compatibility with DAO even though ADO was functionally little more than a version upgrade to DAO. 

That really pissed me off:  I had to rewrite a 30,000 line program because of that.

[Golden Eagle]

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...

I don't think that's a realistic option, if MS could have done it, they would have, to avoid complaints such as these. And if they the original authors can't, probably no one can, at least not affordably.

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.

Seems to me that Microsoft must have one hell of a good design on their hands, otherwise some of their largest detractors in the open source community wouldn't be trying to clone it with their "mono" environment. They claim it's a fantastic concept, from what I've read.

VB.Net makes for a poor competitor to almost any enhanced VB 6 compiler imaginable.

Depends on what you're looking for, VB.NET is much more internet savy, and more compatible with external protocols/languages. The tools and 3rd party add ons will eventually mature, it's not as long in the tooth as VB, and more complex to integrate additional features.

Bottom line, if you haven't upgraded your skills yet, I wouldn't wait much longer, because as you surely know, it's a whole new "paradigm", to use dilbertism.

[Southack]

"if MS could have done it, they would have, to avoid complaints such as these. And if they the original authors can't, probably no one can, at least not affordably."

If it couldn't be done, MicroSoft would happily sell the rights and code to their VB 6 engine. If it can be done, then they will staunchly refuse to ever let their VB 6 engine be bought by a 3rd party firm.

[Southack]

"Depends on what you're looking for, VB.NET is much more internet savy, and more compatible with external protocols/languages. The tools and 3rd party add ons will eventually mature, it's not as long in the tooth as VB, and more complex to integrate additional features."

VB.Net is fine for a new firm, or for an individual programmer. On the other hand, VB.Net is a disaster for firms with large existing bases of VB 6 (or VB 5) code.

If you are writing everything from scratch, then VB.Net is fine (presuming that you don't need to interact very much with major VBA applications such as MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access, Autocad, etc.)...but if you want to leverage programming work that you paid for some years ago, forget it.

[Southack]

"Bottom line, if you haven't upgraded your skills yet, I wouldn't wait much longer, because as you surely know, it's a whole new "paradigm", to use dilbertism."

If you are going to update your skills, you should first learn what skills offer the most reward; that won't be VB.Net.

VB.Net killed the momentum that VB 6 built up from VB 5; VB.Net will not match that level of corporate interest and demand in any reasonable timeframe.

And since you have to learn a new development environment and programming architecture if you want to move from VB 6 to VB.Net, you might as well learn a new development environment and programming architecture that will be around longer, in more use, and pay more than VB.Net skills.

There are other, better options out there, after all. VB.Net isn't the only programming development environment out in the field, you know!

[Golden Eagle]

VB.Net is a counter-productive nightmare...a beast...a cost-adding, time-wasting monster.

As I already said, it depends on what you're using it for. If your building large multi-user enterprise applications, .NET is far superior. If you're building " little tiny test applications that rarely get used by anyone besides the programmer" as you put it, use VB. No one is stopping you, you have the license, and can buy the support. If they eventually kill the support, which being a commercial company they might, if it's no longer profitable, move to something else, or find a 3rd party support vendor. You could also move to a different product, if you want. The sky is definitely not falling.

[Southack]

"As I already said, it depends on what you're using it for. If your building large multi-user enterprise applications, .NET is far superior."

No, VB.Net has an inferior error detection and correction architecture that requires the programmer to code every line she desires to check for an error by hand, rather than the old VB 6 way of identifying a single error handler and turning on automatic error detection that checked at every line for you. VB.Net is also inferior with VBA application integrations (typically the most used applications in many firms, e.g. MS Word, MS Excel).

But worse, VB.Net can't handle *existing* VB 6 multi-user enterprise applications. So your existing multi-user enterprise applications are screwed if you want to upgrade to VB.Net.

Now granted, if you are only now getting around to writing multi-user enterprise applications (i.e. you can write everything new from scratch and have no need to leverage your existing code base), then VB.Net is OK.

Not great. Just OK.

[Golden Eagle]

If it couldn't be done, MicroSoft would happily sell the rights and code to their VB 6 engine.

I see now past history of that, for any product, do you? Sounds like an incorrect assumption.

VB.Net is fine for a new firm, or for an individual programmer. On the other hand, VB.Net is a disaster for firms with large existing bases of VB 6 (or VB 5) code.

Not the case in my shop. Granted, I run the network side of the house, but our best developers (out of a dev team of about 45) were raving about .NET before it even was available, based on advance info they got at DevCon. We were running the beta copy on quite a few systems (which I had the right to gripe about, as we knew in advance we'd have to completely wipe those systems when the gold release came out in just a few months), but I gave in because I never saw anyone so excited about anything.

Granted, most of our apps were MTS/COM/COM+ and not desktop variety, but they claimed the amount of code in many cases was reduced from several pages to like 4 lines.

Now, they're already clamoring for the new VS 2005, I don't have time to know all the reasons why, but most everything they do now is VB.NET. Me? I still use HTML, Java, and some Perl, LOL.

[Southack]

"You could also move to a different product, if you want. The sky is definitely not falling."

I agree.

Corporations that have been burned by MicroSoft's VB.Net trashing of their VB 6 code bases are at least going to consider moving to other products rather than remaining with proprietary MicroSoft "solutions" that may again at some point in the future "lose" backwards compatibility.

No doubt C++ and Java will gain some new adherents from those who leave the VB line.

And MicroSoft is big enough that even VB.Net will probably stumble along without actually falling out of use.

So the sky isn't falling.

[Golden Eagle]

Now granted, if you are only now getting around to writing multi-user enterprise applications (i.e. you can write everything new from scratch and have no need to leverage your existing code base), then VB.Net is OK.

You don't have to throw your old applications out the window, we still have a couple of COM now COM+ apps that do mission critical work. Our most important application though was re-written from the ground up using .NET 1.0 and recently we upgraded the framework to 1.1 which caused zero issues. Our guys don't really like going back and hacking those old VB apps though, there's only about 2 guys on the entire team that keep those skills up, everyone else is apparently happy doing the .net thing. Obviously you're only going to come along kicking and screaming, but that's not the feeling I get from my development team, nor others in other organizations I interact with.

[Southack]

"our best developers (out of a dev team of about 45) were raving about .NET before it even was available"

Of course they did. And they'll rave about VS 2005, and VB 2006, and *every* new release of every hip, cool new gadget and toy.

...Because that's what developers do (especially the young ones).

But developers don't pay the bills for establishing corporate code libraries. For a developer, throwing out old code simply means more job security, after all, that means that more code needs to be re-written.

On the other hand, try telling all of your existing *clients* that they need to pay your firm to re-write all of their existing frontline software in order to have the same functionality, but running under the "latest and greatest" compiler release.

[sevry]

I don't need to "tell anyone" that.

Then tell it to them. Tell it to those that I mentioned. Some of them probably consider themselves conservative. But they still feel entitled, and even to government jobs. I mean, don't tell me. I'm convinced. I find the behavior to be inappropriate. But so . .

So why not form your own company

Everybody does. And Microsoft seems less a threat to them. One of the reasons - they're upsetting, and frightening, their customer base. It's the free market. Don't fear the free market. If Microsoft's policies are finally non-competitive, after years of the opposite, then in that competitive aspect or portion of the market, it's up to them to change - it's not up to their customers. Understand that.

I used to always pity was the maintenance people and the ugly spaghetti code. Still it is a CHOICE to do that.

You sound furious about - life, or something. Those programmers couldn't have taken that attitude to such work, because it would have been so daunting. I'm sure, to a degree, they had to be positive about it, or burn out right then and there. Good teachers.

Think Raines will get a sterling reference?

Umm . . . does he care? He cashed in. His 'package', his 'parcel', his 'enclosure', his 'addressed to occupant' was in excess of $120million dollars. And will he get a reference from fellow Dem? BANK ON IT? as they say.

It's funny if you think about it. But it's also a horrible public example. It's wrong. And he was wrong. And you're wrong to defend him.