VB6 and The Evil Dead - "JOIN USSSS"
I saw The Evil Dead last week for the first time. In the film (as if you didn't know) a group of youngsters take a holiday in a deserted log cabin, which just so happens to have been the former home of an occultist. Obviously, lots of bad things happen; just when you think someone's dead, they come back to life as a hideous zombie hungry for blood, and have to be dismembered to finally put them to rest.
The reason I mention this is that at the end of this month (March 31), VB6 comes to the end of its "mainstream" lifecycle. It will then enter an "extended" phase, which is the limbo all products experience before they finally go up to the bityard in the sky.
So VB6 is dead...
Wait! What was that noise?! No, it can't be! VB6 stirs, the lips part and cry "JOIN US!!".
Yes. A group of VB6 developers (including a bunch of MVPs) have started a petition to keep VB6 (or VB.com as they've chosen to call it) alive. If they get their way this decaying abomination will live on in VS.NET side by side with C# and VB.NET.
Why? Because these developers have decided that the step to VB.NET is a step too far. After years of crying out for a proper OO language and full access to the underlying OS (without having to rely on esoteric API calls), these devs have rejected VB.NET. They want to keep VB6, warts and all.
In the movie, a variety of tools (chainsaws, knives, axes, shotguns) are used to dispatch the walking dead and to put them to rest. Ignoring them is not an option. Fortunately, in the case of VB6 ignoring it is the only option. Eventually these devs will realise that VB6 really is dead. They may get angry, say they'll drop MS technologies; but where are they gonna go? I mean, to Java? If they can't handle VB.NET then they ain't gonna get on with Java. Maybe one of these smart guys will invent a time machine and return to 1991.
"Join us"? Get outta town!
posted by Adam Young @ 9:16 pm
2 comments
2 Comments:
The worst part of it all is that the supporting freelance communities are removing all the '6 support and promotion. We, the hobbie-devs are being left behind under the thrusting wake of psychopathic media pumping vb.net is getting to attract pro-dev's. What about us? Are we forced to shrug it off? Where are the 'old VB6 programming BBS's'? Will we dwell on down the e-streets begging for spares and mumbling none-sense of a past time when we were at the top, and were the ones rising high and shining, but are now old, torn, dead and forgotten?
We need a new e-H.Q. to gather up and put up an offensive.
Pablo.
Hi Pablo
MS are trying to push hobbyists into the new free "Express" products centred around a cut-down version of VS (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/), but of course you'd still need to upgrade your skillset to .net.
I guess VB.old will be around for a while yet, even though MS have kicked it into touch. Getting to grips with .net is a bit of a mindblast at first, but once you get over the culture shock it's really not that bad at all, and is a *massive* improvement over the old com-based dev.
As a hobbyist, there's no reason why you can't keep maintaining all your old code for the forseeable future - but for new projects why not try out VB.net or C# - the open- / shared-source movement for these languages is *huge* compared with what it was for VB and C++ (take a look at http://sourceforge.net/ and http://csharp-source.net/, and this is just the tip of the iceberg).
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