It is with great sadness that I mark today, March 31, 2005, as the end of free support for Visual Basic 6.0. I am relatively new to the whole VB experience. I started with VB4 and even then was not all that impressed becuase I had been using PowerBuilder and it was so much easier to use a DataWindow to bind to data than anything in VB but management had changed at a long time client of mine and the new management made it clear that everything was going to be developed in VB so if we wanted to stay there we had better become experts in VB. Well many years and many VB projects later I now like VB a lot more. I am impressed with some of the VB .NET features and can't wait to begin working with the new stuff in VS 2005 full time when it finally ships.

So what does that mean to you if you are still developing or maintaining VB6 applications? (There are some people who are doing this because I answered a VB6 question just this morning.) Well for one thing the VB runtime is part of the operating system and will be supported for many years to come. There have been 6 service packs and Microsoft has committed to continuing to publish any security related patches. All it really means is that if you need support on VB6 that can not be answered by the community or by any of the available resources like MSDN developer center then you will have to pay for the support. You can get more details at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.asp.