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…

[Tax Government]

Microsoft's secret weapon agains competitors has been its symbiosis with a support class of computer professionals (MCSE, MCP, MCSD, etc.), who acted as an unpaid salesforce and kept their employers safely within the MS product suite.

Microsoft's products are intentionally inferior, in order to give the support class some reason to exist. (Employers need the support class, and the class in turn has a set of manageable tasks and technical assistance in those tasks from Microsoft.)

The cadre of external Visual Basic experts has served its purpose for MS, and can now go about its next task (selling real estate or home loans, I think).

[Arkinsaw]

Ever program in DIBOL?

No, but I played around with APL. It never took off because to program in that language you had to have a special keyboard! LOL.

[nmh]

"There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition."

Then perhaps like others, you need to prepare to do something else - like the next version or perhaps simply change fields. Is there some reason that you are above this and others aren't?

"Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English." Not everyone can be a Bill Gates and leap tall buildings in a single bound.""

Personally, I see NO comparison to keeping around an old version of Visual Basic to algebra and English. Surely Visual Basic is not comparable! Oh, stop with the class envy.

[nmh]

Why not circulate a petition to require COBOL and FORTRAN to be around just long enough till folks retire? Why stop at Visual Basic.

[Tax Government]

"There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition."

In the sluice method of gold separation, there are a series of little waterfalls where light-weight stuff gets washed over the edge to the next level. Any person in the programming CRAFT should have a lifelong commitment to never being washed over the edge...without a fight. A person who has no energy to keep evolving is no longer really functional, and should make plans to change jobs before getting washed away.

[baseball_fan]

Here are some comments I found when I googled "visual basic 6" under "news":

While VB6 was _released_ in 1998, the long haul to .NET meant that it was only replaced at all less than four years ago, and only replaced by a practical replacement (I tend to ignore VB.NET 2002/.NET Framework 1.0) under two years ago. That isn't long enough to migrate.

However, the petition calls for something impractical - integration into the current Visual Studio IDE. 'Classic' VB is just way too different. The designers aren't going to work in the new environment. The debugger is based on an out-of-process model, unlike VB6's in-process host (where your code ran inside the VB6.exe process, and could crash the IDE). Debugging is one area of many where VB.NET is simply massively superior to its predecessor.

Businesses do have quite large numbers of legacy VB6-based line-of-business applications. As a bespoke solution provider, we've written a number of them - we now do new work in C# or VB.NET but maintenance and extensions to older projects are much cheaper without translation, which would take longer and hence incur extra costs.

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I work for a large global corporation that employs close to 50,000 people. We have quite a few applications written in house in VB6. These aren't toy apps, these apps are used as front ends to systems that process tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. .net isn't an enhancement to VB, it's a replacement language. Dill weeds like yourself that state 'spare us the complaints' and 'it's time for an intervention' clearly have absolutely no idea what life in the real world is like. It seriously *******me off when people make such stupid blanket statements. It only serves to prove your absolute ignorance.

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Try to see this from a corporate programmer's point of view. Microsoft so drastically changed the grammar and rules of this new language, it made porting many of the existing VB6 apps near impossible. And with corporate budgets as tight as they are, people are stuck using VB6 even today.

What M$ should have done is made the first update after VB6 more of an incremental upgrade - changing some things for the better, but leaving others alone; ease the burden of porting our corporate RAD applications. Then, the next version could enhance that even further. SPaced properly apart, these "baby steps" would have helped developers migrate. Instead, M$ chose to jump five steps forward, leaving developers to either buck up the large amounts of cash to perform these insanse ports to the new platform, or wither and die with their now legacy apps.

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Hey Dill Weed who works for the little 50,000 user company; I am the assistant to the CIO for our company that employees over 79,000 world-wide. We too have quite a few VB6 apps litering our operations and a few of them contribute to the multibillion dollar operations we run. My reaction to the end of VB6 support is: So what? It's not like VB6 will stop working or will any of the apps written in it. Not that we'll have any shortage of VB6 era programmers (unfortunatly) and there are mor than a ton of 3rd party add-ons that still work just fine with VB6. You act as if a switch was to be thrown that would turn all these apps off.

AND, Paul is right - time for an intervention. Start now using .net, slowly move to the current generation of tools/code. Just because you work for such a large company it's obvious that you are not in charge there because your shortsighted knee-jerk reaction sounds like that of a VB6 programmer who has no .NET skillz and is therefore worried about losing his job to someone who does.

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Another aspect to the still prominent use of VB6 is it's compatability with VBA code inside office apps such as Excel and Word and Access. As an Architect, I have developed many apps in VB6 that integrate to VBA seamlessly. I can write an app using a combo of VB and VBA without any problems using COM interfaces. At this point, VB.net addins loaded into Autocad cannot be unloaded from AutoCAD without a restart; not a very viable development model. Until the .net platform is as ubiquitous and well integrated as VB6 into the wide range of business applciations, the older version will still be in high use.

If Microsoft ( and other companies integrating their technologies ) would give me a good enough excuse to switch, I would...

[nmh]

I agree.

This guy is willingly getting washed away and screeching all the way.

[Ingtar]

Have you seen the .NET 2.0 beta yet? The ease of use is quite high.

VB.NET has a conversion program for version 6. It seems well suited as a teaching tool in some ways. Anything it cannot convert, it usually tells you why and points to somewhere in the help so that you can fix it yourself. It still misses some things, but it covers a lot of ground.

[John Lenin]

There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition." Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English."

Quit whining, Fortran and Cobol are pretty much dead languages too. Though Cobol made somewhat of a comeback.

[Tax Government]

Farther out toward the horizon, hardcode COM expertise will be less widespread and more of a niche skill. COM is not being retired exactly, but is wrapped by .NET.

The hard-to-learn C++-based programming skills that build COM applications today will be replaced by an easier-to-learn set of skills in .NET languages. So, if you are a potentially unemployed VB programmer today, look to pick up .NET skills that simplify the use of COM.

[Tax Government]

If someone wants a really world-class, high-value programming assignment, try making an Excel clone with no reachable limits on row counts, cell counts, worksheet counts, etc.

(If one exists already, I humbly eat crow now and request a link.)

[general_re]

Dunno about no reachable limits, but Quattro Pro will go up to a max of 18,278 columns, 1,000,000 rows, and 18,278 sheets, which is a bit more elbow room than you get in Excel.

[editor-surveyor]

"Bill Gates hasn't had to personally learn a new trick since he pulled the DOS wool over the eyes of his partner and of IBM way back in the 70's."

Essentially true, but not politically correct to say here.

[Tax Government]

Thanks much. I can't believe that some big orgs aren't bumping into Excel limits or unreliability.

[Rdev]

I started programming in the mid 60's in ALC but quickly moved to COBOL and have never looked back. I have had occasion to try the new "language de jour" along the way. I actually liked VB as it was easy to learn and vba has been quite useful in office apps, but I have not found a situaion where COBOL has let me down. As I near retirement, I have thought of what to do with the applications that are still runing but I imagine they will be runing long after I'm gone. The COBOL compiler developers are adding new features every day. I have COBOL applications which have the look and feel of windows. Many of these apps where written over twenty years ago. I just updated as new features became available. I don't see that changing for many years. My apps may not be 'pure' COBOL as I incorporate the tools I need to get the job done, but under the COBOL umbrella!

[Alouette]

Technology is rapidly moving forward and if you cannot adapt then you don't belong in the field.

It's not a matter of moving technology. Upgrades are very costly and large applications are not that easy to migrate.

This business is supposed to be customer driven, not vendor-manipulated.

[Southack]

"If Microsoft ( and other companies integrating their technologies ) would give me a good enough excuse to switch, I would..."

Bad idea. Even if MicroSoft came up with a viable *business* case to switch from VB6 to VB.Net, on a corporate level you are setting yourself up for failure when MicroSoft's *next* release of VB.Net does to the VB.net what VB.Net did to VB6 (i.e. fail to implement backwards compatibility).

To go to VB.Net from the corporate perspective (a very different bean-counting viewpoint from that of a single independent programmer), your teams have to learn an entirely new development environment, a new programming language, a new architectural paradigm, as well as give up the superior VB 6 integration with VBA office apps such as Autocad, MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, etc. Oh, and you also lose VB 6's superior error detection and correction capabilities.

And once you get your team through all of those hurdles, your corporation has to antitcipate that MicroSoft is once again going to screw you by killing backwards compatibility again when they come out with the next release of VB.Net or its successor ("Wired.net" anyone?!). I mean, if MS killed backwards compatibility going from VB 6 to VB 7 (ooops, VB.Net), then why wouldn't they kill it again going from VB.Net to VB 8?

Essentially, MicroSoft is saying that VB should not be used by corporations, only by independent programmers who don't have much at stake (e.g. having to rewrite large amounts of legacy apps). After all, re-work for the sake of rework is hardly what project managers want to present to their corporate CIO's.

Technically, VB.Net is inferior in multiple areas (e.g. no backwards compatibility, VBA support/integration, error detection and correction) to the older VB 6, anyway. Worse, if you make the jump to VB.Net, at any moment MicroSoft is liable to screw you by coming out with a new version of VB that once again isn't backwards compatible.

Can you imagine the howls from the C++ crowd if some new version of C++ didn't support older C++ code?!

It's utter madness, yet that's precisely what MicroSoft did with Visual Basic. At a corporate level, everyone besides MicroSoft has got to get away from VB; you simply can't justify going forward with release plans that may or may not be backwards compatible in the future, much less be technically inferior to the older releases in the first place.

[John Lenin]

Cobol is a good language and much easier to debug than a lot of modern languages. C++ looks like Fortran to me.

[1stFreedom]

NOTICE, .NET 2.0 Beta is out.. Sql Server 2005 beta is out...

Don't fall behind the curve... Start NOW, and retrain yourself before the products even hit the market...

(I have to download both myself...)

[editor-surveyor]

"We still have some Microsoft Fortran programs running under DOS. And how many years has it been that that one hasn't been supported?"

You guys have it good, and don't know it. - When I last did any programming for anything other than a hand calculator, it was IBM Fortran IV and COBOL running on IBM 1130/1800's. For the last 15 years I've had calculators that fit into my shirt pocket that have more horse power than an 1800!