Sunday, March 8, 2015

The fury in the Visual Basic 6.0 community caught Microsoft by surprise


Microsoft, update or open source VB6 programming

The fury in the VB community caught Microsoft by surprise. They expected everyone to greet the new release with enthusiasm, throw away their copies of VB6 and switch to .NET without delay. They forgot to account for the real world where developers have legacy systems to maintain and little time to learn a completely new development environment. 
According to a Microsoft spokesman, the uptake of .NET was "dismal" for quite a long time. The VB6 programming community split between those who embraced the new technology wholeheartedly, those who stuck stubbornly to VB6, and those who jumped ship and switched to other environments such as Delphi.
After a developer is sufficiently comfortable with .NET and has spent several weeks in studying the migration process with the tool, Zoufaly says that a migration should progress at an average rate of just 7,000 to 10,000 lines of code per week. Therefore, a 1 million-line VB6 application will take 100 weeks—two years—to upgrade. Seems a little slow for something that Microsoft had the hubris to dub a migration "wizard." 
The "wizard" has since been dropped by Microsoft.
"VB6 is still the product to beat in performance." - Paul Yuknewicz, Microsoft

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