Developers petition Microsoft over VB6

Microsoft has decided to end standard support for popular tool Visual Basic 6.0 by April, sparking protests from developers.

Developers in the US have started a petition asking the software giant to reverse the decision.

Among the standard service offerings Microsoft plans to end on 31 March are free professional telephone and online incident support and free critical updates, according to a posting on the company's MSDN site for developers.

Both services, however, would be available until March 2008 for a fee.

Also, Microsoft will stop issuing service packs for VB6, with the latest product fixes, by the end of the month.

Consultants and independent software vendors who signed the petition are upset over Microsoft's apparent move to phase out the older VB platform in favor of Visual Basic .Net.

The problem, according to developers, is that the two platforms are so different, that applications written in the older language have to be rewritten to run in a .Net environment.

"It's basically impossible to migrate programs written in earlier versions of Visual Basic to the .NET version," developer Rich Levin, host of PC Talk Radio, said in a posting on his blog.

"That means any organisation with an investment in Visual Basic code -- consultants, ISVs, IT departments, businesses, schools, governments -- are forced to freeze development of their existing VB code base, or reinvest virtually all the time, effort, intellectual property, and expense to rewrite their applications from scratch."

Microsoft, which first released VB6 in 1999, was not available for comment.

The petition, signed by more than 130 software developers, many members of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional program, asks Microsoft to continue shipping updated versions of VB6 inside its Visual Studio integrated development environment along with VB .Net.

The move, according to developers, would not be unprecedented, since Microsoft currently supports its older C++ language, as well as its new C# (C-sharp) language in the .Net platform.

"With both VBs in the same IDE, it should be possible to extend the development environment to provide a high degree of interoperation between them," the petition said.

"That will allow the developer to use both in the same solution, with the interop handled seamlessly by the framework."

In a survey of more than 400 developers in October, US market researcher Evans Data found that 45 percent of North American developers mainly use VB6 or earlier. Some 34 percent primarily use VB .Net.

In Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), however, Visual Basic use has lost 25 percent of its developer base since 2003. Use of VB .Net has grown to 32 percent of EMEA developers today from 16 percent in the [US] autumn of 2002.

Several million professional developers worldwide still program in VB, sources said.