Improvements to Visual Basic 6 Runtime Support on Vista, Windows Server 2008 (by Paul Yuknewicz)
You probably didn’t notice it, but we made some important and beneficial changes to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 just a few weeks ago, and I want to share the good news.
First, just like Vista, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is officially supported on Windows Server 2008.
Second, we have expanded the list of ActiveX controls that are officially supported as part of Vista and Windows Server 2008.
For background, when we first announced over a year ago that the Visual Basic 6.0 applications would “just work” on Windows Vista, many of you pointed out there were a number of widely used ActiveX controls, such as comctl32.ocx and richtx32.ocx, listed as “tested but not shipping.” That basically means they aren’t supported on Vista, even though they are important pieces of many Visual Basic 6 applications. So the Visual Basic team spent the last year-plus talking with product teams all over Microsoft and offered to take over the code base for those components so we could support them. Now, we’re pleased to announce that we have added support for a number of controls and components commonly used in VB6 apps, and identified compatible upgrades for some less commonly used controls.
To summarize we hope these improvements will make you even more successful in preserving your VB6 assets. This should provide some peace of mind as you think about moving forward gradually to VB.NET, the most used MS .NET language, in VS2008 and future versions.
Best,
Paul Yuknewicz
