Re: What this mean for Borland?

Bob,

MS took what was arguably the largest programmer base in existence
(generally estimated @ 6 mill) and simply stopped supporting their
language/platform combination. Suck it up--program for .NET or go home. That
your idea of commitment?

No, my idea of commitment is selling of the entire product suite. </sarc>

Seriously, though, there is something to be said for backward compatibility, but there's also such a thing as /too much/ backward compatibility, as well. VB had to change for .NET, and in my book MS did the right thing in changing it, rather then trying to squeeze the old VB onto the framework. VB (as much as i still loathe it ;) has gotten better for it. As a matter of fact Borland did the opposite mistake with Delphi for .NET imho - Delphi needed to change for .NET, and they failed to do so - but that's a topic for a different discussion).

That said VB6 isn't going anywhere, so it's not like developers that have exiting applications written in VB6 cannot continue to use VB6 to maintain these apps, or even continue using VB6 to write new applications. (this, as a matter of fact, is an argument that should be familiar to you as it is often made about Delphi in these newsgroups, as in "why do you complain, your Delphi 7 isn't gonna stop working").

Could MS have done better? Sure. Personally i don't understand why they didn't just keep VB/unmanaged around in VS2003 and VS2005 - even as a lowly maintained project flavor, doing so would have made a lot of people happy. But i suppose at some point resource limitations come into play, even for someone as big as Microsoft.

This just imho, of course.

--
marc hoffman
Chief Architect, .NET
RemObjects Software
http://www.remobjects.com

and the fifty-two daughters of the revolution
turn the gold to chrome
.

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