While I know there a lot of work to be done on meeting the standards of VB 8.0 there is a urgent need among people who use classic vb 6 code to be able to move their code base forward.
The issue isn't one where we want to remain stuck in time or believe that somehow that vb6 version of basic is superior. The issue is that we can't transfer our code without a total rewrite. Unlike the history of C/C++ and other mainstream langauges Microsoft totally broke backwards compatibility to the point where we can't realisticly even do a staged upgrade of a older code base.
I am 20+ year programming vetern who brought my company's code base forward from a HP Workstation, to DOS, to Windows 16-bit, and finally to Windows 32-bit. (http://www.plasma-automation.com ). The reason our project was written in Basic in the first place was that we deal with CAD/CAM machine controls. In the middle 80s when the first version of the software was written the HP had the 300 series workstation that had the right price and feature to build a graphical CAD/CAM controller for a cutting machine. The language avaliable was Rocky Mountain Basic.
At its core our software has many code only modules that ported unchanged through the years. The biggest transition is when we jumped from Rocky Mountain BASIC to Visual Basic in the early 90s. One of the reasons we choose Visual BASIC was we were impressed that Microsoft retained a high degree of compatibility with their DOS BASICs. Windows may change but we were confident that the core langauge will be stable and allow us to focus on the new APIs advanced versions of Windows may bring.
But VB.NET blew that all out of the water. Not only our GUI have to be re-written but with several changes in the fundemental data types we have to rewrite our core routines. Suddenly
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