When will it be impossible to support Visual Basic

Question

In the last 3-5 years I have been renewing an insurance application and a commmercial integration toolkit based on Visual Basic 6.0.

According to Microsoft's "It just works policy" the IDE is no longer supported after april 8th 2008.

It still works to develop and deploy Visual Basic 6.0 applications.

When will it be impossible to support Visual Basic 6.0 applications, or will they live forever like Cobol applications do?

Update: Microsoft statement march 2010: The Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 including R2, and Windows 7.

Update may 2011:
Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!

Answer 1

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 2

I have to say this is something you cannot accuse the much (and justly!) maligned COBOL for.

COBOL is continuously supported with frequent new releases from IBM, UNISYS, MicroFocus on several platforms which support things like the latest hardware, 64bit addressing, built in support for XML etc.. There is even a Linux version (OpenCobol) which is progressing nicely.

Furthermore the language itself is continuously developing (if you can call making the same old mistakes with new reserved words developing :-} ) and the latest langauge specification is fully OO look here if you don't believe me!

So COBOL is not yet dead merely archaic. Whereas I think VB 6.0 really is dead and just bit late for its own funeral.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

It only becomes "impossible" if you start adding machines and OS's into the mix that the app will no longer run on.

Vista will still run VB6 apps. My guess is that 7 will continue to do so as well.. and if not, there is always virtualization.

Any type of hardware / os upgrades that your company may be planning needs to take your existing LOB applications into consideration. This is no different than taking your current version of Office or your email client into consideration.

PC's don't really have an expiration date. Even if you are stuck with XP you can get hardware that works with it and will continue to do so for quite some time. If you buy prebuilt machines, you may need to simply downgrade the installed OS. Which isn't that big a deal.

That said, you probably have about 3 more years before things become difficult, and another 1 or 2 after that before people no longer want to work in your IT department because of how ancient everything is.

Answer 5

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 6

You will always be able to develop in VB 6, since Microsoft won't visit your computers to uninstal it. If you don't want to rewrite your application, then you don't/won't have to.

But the tools you get now are the same as the ones you'll have ten years from now. So, you may end up falling behind as new computer science paradigms come along(assuming you won't develop your own VB compiler).

By sticking with current VB, your application will always be "possible" to maintain, but it'll get harder every second.