More than 100 influential developers using Microsoft products have signed a petition demanding the software company reconsider plans to end support for Visual Basic in its "classic" form.
The developers, members of Microsoft"s Most Valuable Professional program which recognizes influential members of the developer community, claim the move could kill development on millions of Visual Basic 6 (VB6) applications and "strand" programmers that have not been trained in newer languages. Microsoft said it will end standard support for Visual Basic 6 at the end of this month, ending free incident support and critical updates. Both services will be available for a fee for another three years.
But MVPs hope Microsoft will reconsider not just VB6"s support options, but will continue to develop the language alongside its newer Visual Basic.Net. "By providing a new version of a COM-based Visual Basic within the Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft will help maintain the value of its clients" existing code, demonstrate its ongoing commitment to the core Visual Basic language, and greatly simplify the adoption of VB.NET by those that wish to do so," the petition says. "The decisions of if, how, and when to migrate code to .NET should lie with the customer."