Hi,

While I enjoyed reading this post, I cannot clap for it because, while I was a VB6 programmer for 12 years (not by choice I might add), I spent the majority of that trying to get rid of it and migrate everything to C#.

It is correct that Microsoft did a poor job offering a migration tool, but that was never the issue for me and my company — we wanted to rearchitect the code anyway when moving it over — which we did.

To me the only issue with .net was that Microsoft blantely copied Java — but left out one of the best reasions to use Java — cross platform capibity.

Dotnet was actually designed with this in mind — but the “everything must be on Windows” obession that was the 00’s meant that the management never allowed runtimes to be built for other platforms. Steve Ballmer as CEO was simply the worst thing ever to have happened to Microsoft full stop.

Thankfully mono showed it was possible, and ultimately when releasing Xamarin built on mono it was a great success.

Thankfully under Satya Nadella reason resumed (I believe simply because he was a developer NOT a marketing guy like Steve Ballmer), and he could see that Microsoft could compete by using there tools and services no matter what platform they were on — we didn’t all have to use Windows if we didn’t want to! Cue Microsoft buying Xamarin (the single best decision in Satya Nadella tenure so far), and using that to ultimately create .net core and .net standard, and ultimately making EVERYTHING cross-platform in the .net stack is almost upon us.
I think it is counter-productive to hold onto old tools like some classic car collector. Classic cars are for people to drive on Sundays — they aren’t for Monday to Friday when most work is done.

We need to use the best tools to do what we need to do to deliver the best solutions to people globally, and the new .net stack gives us that — and actually outdoes what Java was originally intended for — especially because of Xamarin!

VB6 is dead. Long live the new .net!