In this interview filmed during QCon London 2008, Ted Neward, author of "Effective Enterprise Java", talks about languages, statical, dynamical, objectual or functional. He dives into Java, C#, C++, Haskell, Scala, VB, and Lisp, to name some of them, comparing the benefits and disadvantages of using one or another.
A prank during TechEd caused many to believe that Visual Basic 6 would be open sourced. While it turned out to be false, it did start a lot of conversations about the language, its legacy, and an open source implementation would mean.
An IT services provider company has migrated an ERP application totaling 950,000 lines of VB6 code to .NET in 9 months.
If a bug fix is shipped and no one knows about, has it been actually been fixed? The VB Power Packs were patched and shipped with VS 2008 SP 1, but only those who knew to explicitly change which DLL they referenced got the update.
Contrary to widely circulated rumors, Visual Basic 6.0 will ship and will be supported on Windows 7 for the lifetime of the OS. However there are no plans to extend VB6 runtime support beyond Windows 7.
A recent Microsoft UK survey found that 87% of Windows developers work for companies that are actively maintaining applications written in Visual Basic 6.0. The survey asks a variety of follow-up questions to gain insight into why companies are still using VB6 eight full years after the release the .NET Framework.
Though released nearly a decade ago, Visual Basic 6 still remains a cornerstone for the IT department of many companies. With so many line of business applications, many no longer with source code, in use, upgrade paths to Windows Vista and Server 2008 needs to be considered carefully. The make the upgrade somewhat easier, Microsoft has committed to an "It Just Works" policy for VB 6 applications.
Developers today are constantly creating applications that consume services of other web sites. Consuming these services requires figuring out and understanding the sometimes complex Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Six years after VB.NET was released, Microsoft is still slowly working towards a true migration path for VB 6 applications. Recently Microsoft released "Visual Basic Power Packs 3.0". This release adds the Data Repeater, an important control for layouts.
