Visual Basic 6 Tools Leaving Support

The Visual Basic 6.0 (VB 6) development environment will leave Extended support on April 8, 2008. The transition will not affect the VB 6 runtime, which is required by deployed applications, but it will increase the costs of maintaining applications with the VB 6 developer tools. Furthermore, neither the tools nor the runtime are guaranteed to be compatible with future Microsoft technologies. Consequently, organizations are likely to step up efforts to replace VB 6 applications or migrate them to newer platforms.

Runtime Not Affected

The VB 6 development environment is leaving the Extended support phase of Microsoft’s product life cycle, in which Microsoft offers free security patches as well as nonsecurity bug fixes and break-fix support for customers with paid support contracts.

However, the move doesn’t affect the VB 6 runtime library (vbrun.dll), which every VB application requires. The runtime ships with all recent versions of the Windows OS and is supported on the same schedule as the underlying OS versions on which it ships. This means, for example, that organizations will be able to get full (Mainstream) support for the runtime on Windows Vista through Apr. 2012 and Extended support through Apr. 2017.