Win 7 good VB6 development environment? [closed]

Question

I have Win 7 on my laptop and I would like to use it as a VB6 dev environment when travelling.

Are there any reasons not to do this? At present I am mainly targetting XP systems.

Answer 1

Are there any reasons not to do this?

Not really, no. Although the VB 6 IDE is officially unsupported and has been since 2008, the Windows and VB teams worked overtime to make sure that it works properly on Windows 7 and Server 2008.

I used to have VB 6 installed on my old dev machine running Server 2008 R2 64-bit and can personally testify that I did not experience any issues whatsoever with such a configuration.

Honestly, developing in Windows 7 will probably make you a better developer. UAC will actively prevent you from doing things that you shouldn't have been doing in the first place, like saving data in the Program Files folder. If you run into this type of problem when testing your application, don't blame VB 6 or Windows—the real problem is your code, and the bug is that it ever worked in the first place. Take this as an opportunity to fix those gaping problems (or at least make a note of them so that they can scheduled for an upcoming fix), even if it's going to work properly on XP anyway.

In a pinch, you can always force the application to run with administrative privileges and/or enable XP compatibility mode by right-clicking on its shortcut. But I certainly don't recommend this as a matter of general practice.