When will it be impossible to support Visual Basic 6.0 applications? [closed]

Answer 1

If you need to continue to support VB6 I would recommend creating a VM that contains XP and VB 6 with all the service packs on it. This way you can continue to run your development environment even though your desktop evolves to something that may be incompatible with the VB 6 dev environment. Installing Visual Studio 6 on Vista had issues two years ago.

For new development beyond maintenance I would look towards using a different environment. It's been my experience that you are better off looking at it from a completely fresh view point and not restrict yourself to migrating to VB .NET. It's enough of a hassle to migrate that you really should do new development in the best environment for your application. That may be VB .NET and it may not.

Developing using obsolete technology is never a problem until it's a problem and then it is too late. You need to stay in the sweet spot of the curve and you are the only one that can decide what that is. If you switch too early you will probably make the wrong decision and if you wait too long you will be too far behind. It's decisions like this that makes this field fun and painful at the same time.

Answer 2

VB6 probably will be around forever in insurance / bank type organizations. Hardware moving out of their realm is not an issue. They will simply get some form of emulator. I've seen an application for a very old mainframe working inside an emulator which was inside of another emulator.

It usually just doesnt make business sense for the non technicals to consider a rewrite and retest for something that already works. -

Welcome to the world of painful hell... get out now :-) -

Answer 3

Most of what is needed to run Visual Basic 6.0 applications is also needed for VBA.

And VBA isn't going anywhere soon - there is simply too much of it about.

So if you're old enough to be developing in Visual Basic 6.0, I wouldn't worry about it stopping working in your lifetime.

Answer 4

It will probably work for a good number of years, but eventually you'll get to the point where you have to maintain old hardware, running an old, unpatchable OS, in order to run the software. Meanwhile, you're missing out on all of the new framework and language goodies that get developed. Eventually, you'll have a need to fix something or add something that isn't possible in your environment and then you get to pay the entire bill for your accumulated technical debt.

My take: you should already be working on an upgrade to a newer platform or replacement for the application. My preference is almost always to do this before I'm forced to by circumstances.

Answer 5

There is a ton of vertical market software developed in VB6 by manufacturers of various types of machinery. VB6 use of ActiveX controls, ActiveX DLLs, and the ability to consume most Win32 DLLs has lead to many manufacturers of various components to support VB6.

Using VB6 and the support libraries is at least an order of magnitude faster and more reliable than the older methods of assembly on custom chips, or using C. Note that even the C/C++ developers were helped as they can consume the new support libraries as well.

Many of these applications are filled with math functions that have been tested to work for the environment and the machinery they were designed for.

So when Microsoft made VB.NET incompatible with VB6 this was a BIG deal for many of us. Unlike the transition from VB3 to VB4-6, we have to touch our code in many place in order to get it working with .NET. So many in fact that it devolves to the same thing as rewriting your software in a new language.

For these reasons VB6 will live on for a while longer as all these machines are out there. Still needing new updates and fixes.

Answer 6

Visual Basic 6.0 works, until you need using threads, or until you will have to face files larger than 4 GB.