Contrary to widely circulated rumors, Visual Basic 6.0 will ship and will be supported on Windows 7 for the lifetime of the OS. Microsoft has released an updated support statement detailing the exact nature of ongoing support.
The Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. The Visual Basic team’s goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications that run on Windows XP will also run on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.
The Visual Basic team is also committed to the Visual Basic 6.0 development environment running on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.
As detailed in the support document, the core Visual Basic 6.0 runtime will be supported for the full lifetime of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, which is five years of mainstream support followed by five years of extended support, per the standard support agreement.
The support statement addresses Windows 7 directly:
Since the initial release of this support statement, the Windows 7 operating system has been announced. This document has been updated to clarify Microsoft’s support for VB6 on Windows 7.VB6 runtime will ship and will be supported in Windows 7 for the lifetime of the OS. Developers can think of the support story for Vista being the same as it is for Windows 7. However there are no plans to include VB6 runtime in future versions of Windows beyond Windows 7.