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TECHNOLOGY
As Microsoft phases out Visual Basic 6, IT developers must make difficult choices on the road to VB .Net.
By Frank Hayes
WHAT ARE WE going to do with all this Visual Basic?
If you're a project manager with a portfolio of Visual Basic applications to maintain, that's no idle question. Microsoft's newest version of its flagship programming language, Visual Basic .Net (VB .Net), is a huge leap forward, re-creating Visual Basic as a full-fledged object-oriented programming environment for building full-scale Web services.
But using VB .Net will require retraining Visual Basic programmers to make them full-fledged object-oriented programmers. And for existing Visual Basic code that has been tweaked and adjusted over many years from version to version, VB .Net may signal the end of the line.
In the long run, keeping those applications going won't be practical: Microsoft will end all support for VB 6 in 2008.
In the short run, corporate software developers have choices to make. They can rewrite those Visual Basic programs in VB .Net. They can choose an- other .Net language, such as C#, or shift to a non-.Net approach like Java. Or they can bide their time by maintaining the programs with VB 6 -- for now.
"There's not a clear need to move applications," says Chris Dial, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "Microsoft has made it easy to run Visual Basic 6 applications under Net." That makes the question of when to think about shifting large legacy Visual Basic applications to .Net much murkier, though Dial says it's clearly time to stop building new software with VB 6.
Going for Broke
Zagat Survey LLC in New York decided to jump right into VB Net with both feet.
"We've been working on this since [VB Net] Beta 1 about two years ago," says Patrick O'Toole, lead developer. "This" is a completely new version of a large legacy Visual Basic application, rewritten from the ground up with expanded features.
At Zagat, which rates restaurants and hotels, the decision to start early with a complete rewrite in VB Net...