Vista success hinges on developers

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Oh dear

I think u took me wrong. i fully understand this is a talkback and opinion based. I think they love as many responses as possible to present more ads and propogate capitalism. (this is the annoying kind imho. Any ad based software. who'd of thought it just 10 years ago). Speaking of 10 years ago, duriung the vintage vb6 days even, certain dialouge occurred that you seem to believe shows MS to be anti dev? Actually, my response about finding more occurances, other than an official apology, was simply a challlenge. I had no expectations. These are only my opinions as well. (if they bother you in any way, just say so. you won't need to tell me twice). I just feel your post is basically moot even if Bill Gates wrote the guy's speech. Free enterprise hires people mainly at will. Don't like a new direction or changes to the dev. runtime? sorry, adapt or walk. It's just a fact of life. Same for partners as well. They simply don't provide the direction to whom they are riding the coattails. big surprise? How about Apple completely pulling the plug on their pre-O$ x community? These comments worse in reality? Feelings are going to get hurt in free enterprise and frankly MS has done more to support their partners over the years than most vendors. Highly configurable backward compatible software that they attempt to make every release work for every partner, over the course of decades(16 bit still mostly supported ) has created the security issues. So, should they try to make a more secure system and managed code runtime, or stay with the far less secure win32 apps and continue being unsecure on the internet? You seem to be the voice of the vb6 crowd today, yet just the other day you had a very vocal (many, many CAPS and !! and expletives) So which is it? Save VB6 for another generation or move on to a secure runtime? You still mad about your company converting all that Cobol over to VB? Get with it Whisperycat.



this mayt ease your mind about the vb6 devs (from your own link)....things aren't so bad afterall



Personally I like .NET. My general instinct when considering the future of a legacy VB application is to plan a new .NET or perhaps a Java application to replace it. However, that is not always realistic. There is another option, which is simply to continue with VB6. Some people are spooked by Microsoft withdrawing support. Here?s the latest official story. In summary, mainstream support ended in March 2005. Extended support, which is almost as good, runs until March 2008. However, the real support for VB6 is in the community and on the Web. By now, almost everything is known about the product. In addition, VB is (as we have seen) hugely extensible. You can call the Windows API; you can consume ActiveX controls; and you can create DLLs in other languages and call them from VB.

There is of course a theoretical risk that Longhorn or some other Windows release might break VB, locking developers to old versions of the operating system. However, this is vanishingly unlikely for the foreseeable future. Microsoft is not stupid. Why would it wreck adoption for a future Windows release by breaking VB apps?

Another factor is that Microsoft itself still uses VB. VBA remains the macro language of Microsoft Office. For that matter, Office is still primarily based on COM. This isn?t only because of legacy code. The .NET Framework does not have any equivalent to Object Linking and Embedding, which is used to great effect in Office. COM is not going away, not in Longhorn, nor in whatever comes after Longhorn.

Consider support for 16-bit applications as a parallel example. 16-bit applications still run in Windows XP, even DOS applications. However, they don?t run in 64-bit Windows. It was impractical to support three levels of Windows (16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit) simultaneously. I?d expect that VB6 applications will still run for as long as 32-bit Windows is supported. I?d also expect that 32-bit Windows will have a much longer life than 16-bit Windows, since there are more applications out there, and the advantages of 64-bit over 32-bit are small for most users. Your VB6 applications will run for a long time yet.

Posted by: xuniL_z   Posted on: 01/24/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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