There are some programming languages that stick around long after general support for them has ended. VB6 is one of those languages. As much as I hate the basic languages I can't argue against the productivity that the language made possible. Some one could pick up VB6 with much less effort and time than other languages (such as C/C++). There's been an uncountable number of enterprise components and legacy applications that were developed in VB6.
Support for VB6 ended years ago. The first version of Visual Studio sold with no VB6 support was Visual Studio .Net 2001. That was almost a decade ago. At that time there were a number of products that carried the .Net badge. The CLR was called .Net, there was VB.Net, Windows .Net Server. Microsoft .Net Messenger, and so on. Microsoft later started dropping the .Net branding from a lot of it's products. I hadn't noticed until a few weeks ago that .Net was dropped from the end of the VB language.
I still encounter people asking how to port their VB (as in VB6) UI to Windows Mobile, or other questions related to VB6. A lot of confusion has resulted since the same name can be used to refer to VB6 and VB.Net. Now that I know the two languages have the same name I think I can avoid future confusion. But I will continue to call the languages by their original name (VB6 and VB.Net). Regardless of how the VB name is used I'll also encourage developers to adopt C#.
 |
The language selection filter from MSDN. Notice it
says "Visual Basic" instead of "Visual Basic .Net" |
Tags: