October 25th, 2007
Microsoft products were most of the time backward compatible. You could open all your code written in older versions of Visual Basic with newer versions. That allowed smooth transitions from version to version of Windows and Visual Basic. Developers were happy to have new features while not having to fix their old code. Microsoft was happy for all their upgrade fees and they didn’t need to support older versions.
That all worked for older developers who only upgraded. I started using VB from version 3 as hobby but i have done some real work only on version 5 and 6. Backward compatibility was only burden for me: i didn’t have any old code with which i could have trouble upgrading while VB could be much better language if they didn’t care about backward compatibility.
This practice was broken with the release of .NET platform. This time you couldn’t just upgrade any code, instead you got the list of unfixed issues and many large projects remained in VB 6. While petitions were set up appealing Microsoft to continue supporting VB6, VB.NET was modern and clean language i embraced immediately.
Now i have several large project written entirely in .NET and i can’t imagine upgrading them with the same procedure like it was from VB 6 to VB.NET. Looking forward, Microsoft has broken backward compatibility once and they could do it again. Then I’ll be some old developer and I’ll write petitions to Microsoft begging them to continue supporting .NET for few years while some new kids will enjoy new and more powerful .AI platform, with new language C~ (C-tilde) and modern VB.AI clean of .NET leftovers.