[German]Brief information for the lovers of VB6 (Visual Basic 6). It looks like Microsoft will continue support for VB6 in Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. This was announced by Microsoft in November 2021 – a blog reader recently asked me about it. This should allow VB6 applications to run on Windows for another 10 years.
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Visual Basic (VB) is a proprietary object-oriented programming language. To distinguish between the old, object-only versions and the new ones based on the .NET framework, the former, up to and including Visual Basic 6.0, are referred to as Visual Basic Classic, while the latter are called Visual Basic .NET (abbreviated VB.NET).
The origins go back to 1991, when Microsoft released Visual Basic 1 for DOS as a continuation of the previous QuickBASIC. Development ended with Visual Basic 6, released in 1998, as this was the last Visual Basic version release that allowed native Win32 programs to be created. But VB6 applications still run, even on the latest versions of Windows.
Support for VB6 extended to Windows 11
There are a ton of programs written in Visual Basic. And until now, Microsoft provided support for Visual Basic 6 in Windows. The programs along with VB runtime environments were still usable. I actually always waited for this support to be discontinued at some point. But even for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 there is still support for VB 6.
From Microsoft there is the article Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows, which was updated for the last time to November 5, 2021. On this day Microsoft has released Windows 11. There it says:
The support policy below has been updated with Windows 10 version 20H2 support information.
Executive summary
The Visual Basic team is committed to "It Just Works" compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on the following supported Windows operating systems:
- Windows 11
- Windows 10
- Windows 8.1
- Windows 7 SP1
- Windows Server 2022
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows Server 2008 R2
The Visual Basic team's goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications continue to run on supported Windows versions. As detailed in this document, the core Visual Basic 6.0 runtime will be supported for the full lifetime of supported Windows versions, which is five years of mainstream support followed by five years of extended support
German blog reader Wolfgang S. pointed that out in mid of December 2021, thanks for that. So it seems that we will have VB6 applications still till 2031.
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