Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Posted Sunday, March 13, 2005 12:34 PM by bill

In Rob Copeland’s first blog entry, he talks about the VB runtime being supported as part of the OS (Windows XP).  When Microsoft started including the VB runtimes with the operating system it really was a great move forward for VB.

Unfortunately that is not guaranteed to go forward.  For example, the VB5 runtimes were removed from windows 2003.  If the same happens with Longhorn then you are kind of in deep sh*t, because the XP runtimes you might have been relying on you can’t legally distribute to other Operating Systems.

I remember at the last PDC, Microsoft made a big thing about how Longhorn is fully backward compatible with a wide range of applications, and indeed the PDC bits did have the VB6 runtime on them.  But windows 2003 tells us a different story.  So can we all sleep soundly now knowing our VB6 apps will continue to run and work on Longhorn, or is it as Rob said “a little confusing” ?

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Comments

# re: Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Sunday, March 13, 2005 3:01 PM by bill

Hey Bill, here's a post discussing this very topic

http://blogs.msdn.com/Brad_McCabe/archive/2005/03/12/394658.aspx

# re: Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Sunday, March 13, 2005 3:14 PM by bill

Hey Frank,

Maybe I should have been more clear. Brad's blog entry does NOT tell us if Longhorn will have the VB6 runtimes on it or not. That is the primary question.

BTW: I also found Brad's post pretty mis-leading. As far as I know you CANNOT distribute the XP VB runtimes, so support for XP runtimes won't do people any good as they will need to compile against the last public available runtimes or those runtimes they have a license to distribute.

# re: Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Sunday, March 13, 2005 3:15 PM by bill

Oh and of course that owuld mean there is also no support for VB6 on Longhorn !!

# re: Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Monday, March 14, 2005 4:11 AM by bill

Hmm... I guess the following quote from Brad McCabe is "a little confusing":

"I have checked with the Development group and it [VB6 Runtime] will work with Longhorn. "

# re: Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Monday, March 14, 2005 8:39 AM by bill

Hey Cory,

Actually Brad says in the comments of his previous post:

"Individual applications might not."

in regards to Vb6 on Longhorn.

That VB6 might just happen to work on Longhorn some of the time, but is an *UNSUPPORTED* scenario is the real issue.

Whether the VB6 runtime is included with LongHorn OS is also part of the issue. If it is not, then talk about VB6 being supported because XP is still supported is just misleading people.

# re: Will VB6 apps run on Longhorn ?

Sunday, May 01, 2005 6:57 PM by bill

VB6 should be able to compile Standalone Applications.