Visual Basic 6, released in 1998, was enormously popular. Its successor, Visual Basic .NET, arrived in 2002 on the new .NET Framework. The problem was that VB.NET was not backward compatible: existing VB6 programs would not simply run on it, and porting them was often hard work. The two products shared a name but were, in practice, different languages.
Many developers had years of working code that could not move forward cleanly, and they were unhappy. As Microsoft’s developer division chief S. Somasegar later acknowledged on his own Microsoft blog, the decision came down to a hard tradeoff made in 1999: Microsoft “concluded that we could do one or the other and not both” between full VB6 compatibility and making VB.NET a first-class citizen on the .NET Framework. They chose .NET, knowing it would “incur some compatibility issues for our VB6 customers.”
The community pushed back. A petition asked Microsoft to keep classic, unmanaged Visual Basic alive, and it gathered signatures from a large number of Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. In his 2005 post “Rumors of my (VB6) demise…,” Somasegar responded directly to the protest, stressing that “Visual Basic support is not ending” and that the change was really a shift from free to paid support. Comments on that very post record petitioners citing more than 225 MVP signatures.
Microsoft did not reverse course. Its lifecycle announcement states that “the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE and Visual Studio 6.0 IDE are no longer supported as of April 8, 2008,” and that “there is no supported method to create or maintain VB6 applications.” The VB6 runtime continued to ship and be supported within Windows, so old applications kept running, but the classic development tool was finished. It remains a clear example of a beloved tool whose users felt left behind by the platform that created it.