Microsoft’s radical switch from Visual Basic 6 to essentially an entirely different language Visual Basic. Backwards compatibility here hasn’t been so side-swept like it has with web browsers. The executables I can compile with it still run in even Windows 7 so I don’t feel any disadvantage using old software when it still gets the jobs I need done. I can spend my thinking on the solution rather than managing the wealth of pop up panels and toolbars in newer versions.įor an 11 year old piece of software, I can be every bit as productive with it as I can be with TextMate on Mac OS X (an awesome text editor). It’s like a really good text editor, more than it is a swank IDE.

I’m familiar with the ins and outs of the software and to me, its simplicity is a benefit compared to the more flash Visual Studio. Why use Visual Basic 6?įor a piece of software so old, and so outdated when I sit in front of it I feel like it’s home to me. You wouldn’t even imagine using Netscape or Windows 98 now! Too old, too incapable, too unstable and no longer even compatible with anything. The browser of choice was Netscape 4.0 (Microsoft had been late to the game but were now bundling IE4 with Windows 98), Netscape had announced the browser was going free and open source in January of the year and the Mozilla project was started. To put this in perspective, Windows 98 had only just been released, most developers would have been running Windows 95 on a 400 MHz Pentium II with 32 MB of RAM. Visual Basic 6 arrived on the scene in 1998 â€” 11 years ago. Dear OSNews readers, what old software (5+ years) do you still use, why, and what problems do you come across in sticking with it? Read More for my own contribution to the listĭespite now using Mac OS X as my main OS, and being completely up to date on all of my software, there is one old program I still use: Visual Basic 6. Software generally ages badly, falling into a state of looking grossly out of date, lacking new functionality that we’ve come to depend upon as well as compatibility problems.

Software moves on at a break-neck pace these days–version numbers clock up ever quicker as vendors try to market their apps as the latest and greatest.

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