What are some convincing arguments to upgrade from Visual Studio 6?

Question

I have a client who is still using Visual Studio 6 for building production systems. They write multi-threaded systems that use STL and run on mutli-processor machines.

Answer 1

The VS 2008 version of the STL compiles with /clr, so if they're interested in transitioning to the managed world, they don't have to lose all their old code.

Answer 2

Unpatched VC6 STL is not thread safe. See here http://www.amanjit-gill.de/articles/vc6_stl.html, the patches aren't included in the service packs and you have to get them from Dinkumware directly (from here http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html) and then apply them to each installation...

Answer 3

operator new doesn't conform to the C++ spec and doesn't throw exceptions on allocation failure, fixing this is non trivial.

see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164087.aspx

Answer 4

If they use the STL, they may be interested in the recently-released feature pack, which includes an implementation of TR1.

Answer 5

By defoult newer versions have better compiler and better libraries. But it's not always easy to port existing projects to newer studio, and you can upgrade both compiler and libraries manually.

I was using VS 6.0 with Intel compiler just year ago. We just had a bunch of old code then, which was threating iterators as pointers and vice versa, and it was all real messy and scary, so this holded us from an upgrade.

But I have had to upgrade after all, because the framework I'm currently using simply doesn't run on VS 6.0. Think this is the ultimative reason :-)

Answer 6

Not supported on 64-bit systems, compatibility issues with Vista, and it was moved out of extended support by Microsoft on April 8, 2008

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbrun/ms788708.aspx