The Decline and Fall of VB6
Sometimes there's an event that has little significance on its own, but tells the story of great shifts in the underlying technology protoplasmic ether. Such an event is Microsoft's recent announcement that they would no longer officially support VB6. Although greeted with howls of protest by Microsoft's own MVP team, the announcement simply formalizes what has already happened.
By the way, what the official announcement of non-support means is that no further service packs will be issued for VB6, and that all unpaid technical support is ended as of the end of March. Developers can still get technical assistance from Microsoft if they pay for it through 2008.
Once the programming language with the most programmers in the world, Visual Basic is now a backwater of a language with little to recommend it. In the .Net world, C# is a much more elegant language than VB, and even has a bit more functionality. So there's really no reason anyone sensible would use VB.Net, the .Net version of Visual Basic, even if they were building .Net applications.
De facto, Microsoft killed Visual Basic in 2001 when it introduced .Net without a good way to upgrade old-style VB6 code. Now, admittedly .Net, which provides an abstraction layer with a great deal of functionality between operating environments such as Windows or the Web and a fully object-oriented programming syntax such as VB.Net or C#, is cool and a great development environment. Far better, in fact than the old VB6. But there's a problem that the structure of VB6 and VB .Net are so different so there's no reasonable way to move code from one to the other. For any sizable project, you'd truly be better off re-writing in .Net to do it right and follow OOP best practices rather than some kind of mechanical port. It's also the case that some VB6 code actually compiles under .Net, but produces results that are not what the VB6 developer intended.
These issues are significant. But even more important is just who .Net and VB.Net are intended for. These are enterprise products, with an enterprise price tag, and an enterprise overhead in terms of the knowledge necessary to use the product well, computing power required, the operating system needed, and so on. But it is the mom and pop developer that made VB6 so incredibly popular, and VB.Net has left this core constituency in the dust.
To a very great extent, instead of trying to deal with the move from VB6 to VB.Net (or C#.Net), the mom and pop developer decided to put their applications on the Web, using languages such as Javascript, Perl, and (most widely and appropriately) PHP. It's unwise to underestimate the intelligence of any computer programmer, even the mom and pop developer, and given the choice of the horrendous and dubiously appropriate upgrade, these people probably made a very smart move. The Web is the closest thing we have to a universal platform.
All these mom and pop developers have left the Microsoft stable forever, and are not coming back. In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the equine inhabitants have fled, Microsoft is attempting to address this issue with the upcoming release of Visual Web Developer Express (part of the Visual Studio 2005 release). It won't work.
Related link: C# Programming Tips and Techniques on Braintique.com
Posted by Harold Davis at March 16, 2005 09:43 AM
