The first thing I would recommend to you is listening to the video interview of Paul Yuknewicz, ("the guy in charge of Visual Basic 6" according to the video): What is Microsoft's VB6 Strategy? The interviewer is the great Beth Massi at Microsoft, also known as The Queen of Visual Basic. It's a much more candid, honest sounding statement than I heard before from Microsoft.
Here's my summarization. (These are my words, not Paul's. I'm sure he would officially, and probably unofficially, disagree completely with them. Still ... It's what I heard.)
1 - Microsoft's former policy, that the only support Microsoft was willing to give to VB6 was support in getting rid of it, was shortsighted and wrong. We admit that now. So we're going to get back to the business of making the damage done just a little less of a problem for our customers.
2 - But we're still not going to give you any kind of support in developing any new VB6 applications. We still don't care if you like VB6. We still can't see development support for VB6 making us any money at all, so we're just not going to do it.
3 - It has become clear to Microsoft that there is a critical mass of customers who are not going to convert their apps to .NET. So, to keep them from moving to Java or Delphi, Microsoft is changing their support position for VB6. We will now make sure that you can at least continue to run your old VB6 apps with any new technology we introduce.
Here's what Paul actually said,
"The major problem that we have is that there is a lot of Visual Basic 6 code out there today."
"We actually changed up our strategy. And now, our strategy is to really migrate gradually and incrementally. We want it to be really easy to move at your own pace so that you can take parts of your application, move those piece by piece, and leave the rest of the code just running, as is in VB6. It's good code, right?"
"Bottom line, if Microsoft rolls out an update - OS update, a Service Pack, something like that - that breaks your applications, we'd be on the hook to fix problems. That's the kind of support we wanted to have. So what we did, we put the VB runtime in Vista. That was actually pretty surprising to a lot of people. And we put it in Windows 7. That means, VB runtime is a component in Windows, and it's governed by the support lifetime of Windows."
Beth Massi: "So effectively, 10 years from Win 7 release, the runtime will be supported?"
"Yeah, 10 years, 2009 ... 2019! You'll still be talking to me about how that support is!"
But they were completely clear that the VB6 IDE - necessary for developing anything new - is not supported. "If the IDE, something happens, well ... y'know ... we'll probably be talking to you about workarounds." And, they will only support software that they directly sold. If it involves a third party component, you're on your own again. In the Army, my drill sargeant used to say it this way, "Sounds like a personal problem to me."
If you're more into an official, printed statements of support, you can find it at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/ms788708.aspx
The rest of Paul's video is advice about how to upgrade to VB.NET. It's good advice! If that's what you're looking for, it's worth listening to.
I was also surprised to see that there were 'some' resources that you can actually use to make VB6 more useful. In particular: Extend Your Visual Basic 6.0 Applications, 'some' VB6 code samples. They won't sell you VB6, but you can still download the fixes and service packs!
So ... if you're still a VB6 refusenik, MSDN.Microsoft.com/VBRun is a worthwhile site!
