Re: The Eventual Famine
Scotf, that is a very good question, and it is one I think we are unable to answer accurately at this time. While it is true Microsoft has continued to drop support for older programs and libraries written in Visual Basic 6 for the time being everyone has managed to retain backwards compatibility by installing the missing components on newer Windows releases. No one knows how long that compatibility will remain, nor weather Windows 9 will have some changes that will effect the status quo. What I can say is that I personally don't' think we need to worry too much about compatibility issues just yet. Until we know for certain that our favorite apps and games won't run on the next generation Windows platform not to assume the worst just yet.
While I wouldn't recommend beginning a new project in Visual Basic 6 for various reasons I also know the way the VB 6 runtime API was designed it is quite possible it may continue operating just fine on Windows 9. You se e, there are two parts to a VB 6 program that may insure some compatibility with newer Windows operating systems. The first part is the Visual Basic Runtime. Basically that is just several libraries written to wrap core Windows APIs and functions to provide them to a Visual Basic programmer. Things like basic Windows components such as buttons, labels, menus, scrollbars, etc aren't likely to change that much from version to version of Windows. If anything Microsoft just adds to what is there such as adding ribbons and so on, but haven't removed support for the basic components used in prior versions of Windows. Therefore it is possible that many VB 6 programs will continue to run on newer Windows versions provided the underlying libraries etc the VB 6 Runtime needs is still present. The other part of VB 6 programming is Windows COM support. Windows COM is a technology whereby any program, regardless of language, can access core Windows libraries via COM. As a r esult as long as various libraries can be accessed via COM such as Sapi 5, for example, it should continue to work regardless of what version of the COM library is installed and what language is being used.
That isn't to say that running older VB 6 games and apps on newer Windows platforms will be error free or without issue. The biggest problem I have found with running a lot of VB 6 programs on say Windows 8 is that they were designed wrong for a modern Windows platform. These days it is a very bad idea to save user settings, saved games, and anything else to the c:\Program Files directory which causes games to crash or lock up because Windows 8 will not let a program do that without admin rights. Another minor but irritating security problem is program signing. What I mean by that is many modern compilers such as Microsoft's .NET compilers allows a programmer to sign his/her programs with the developer's name, the company name, version number, program name, c opyright info, etc and when an end user passes his/her mouse over the program a property window will appear in Windows Explorer/File Explorer displaying this info. It is this very info that User Account Control uses when prompting a user to accept or cancel an operation. Many older VB 6 games and apps lacks this information meaning a user might get prompted by UAC about program.exe and it will say unknown next to the developer, version, number, etc making it difficult for the end user to identify if it is a legitimate program or some sort of malware. It is these various security holes in VB 6 which is a major concern, and one reason why I am not using the language for serious production. It was designed first and foremost for a different era of Windows and it is time to update one's skills and get with the modern tech if developing for a modern PC.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?p id=172101#p172101
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