Here, I have to give the decision to Jeff. The average of three test runs on my computer resulted in the conclusion that, at least in this particular test, VB 6 is 83 percent faster than VB.NET. Not too bad!
Another interesting result was that building VB.NET as a "release" build rather than a "debug" build only gave a benefit of 5 percent. And running NGEN (Native Code Generator) against the VB.NET assembly didn't seem to improve the performance at all.
I have to conclude, however, with a lesson that has come hard to someone who learned programming when every millisecond counted. The lesson:
Milliseconds actually don't count much anymore.
Computers are so fast and cheap these days that, in spite of what Jeff might feel, the most important factors are the costs of programming and the ability of the language to do the tricks that today's applications need. Factoring those things in makes VB.NET a clear, hands down winner!
