Microsoft, while still committed to ending free support for VB 6.0 at the end of the month, believes it has a plan to hopefully satisfy discontented developers. Developers have been allowed two free incidents of support throughout the lifecycle of the product.
"Where Microsoft is really going to be placing our investment is in helping developers to move their skills to VB .Net and VB 2005," said Jay Roxe, Microsoft product manager for Visual Basic.
To that end, VB 2005, due in the second half of this year, will have the Edit and Continue function that has been popular with VB 6.0 developers. This feature provides the ability to pause a program while it is executing and allows changing of code and continuing to execute without having to stop and restart the program, according to Microsoft.
Also due in VB 2005 is a reuse feature called RegFree COM (Component Object Model), which allows developers to use existing COM controls, such as those developed with VB 6.0, without having to register them on their machine. Developers thus can reuse functionality while avoiding development problems that have plagued VB 6.0, according to Microsoft.
Additionally, Microsoft will continue free run-time support for VB 6.0, providing, for example, patches for security issues. But patches will no longer be issued for issues such as problems with tools.
The drive toward unity
Sun, with JSF, has encountered similar problems transitioning developers. Sun is pushing JSF as the preferred method for Web development but the technology must vie with other offerings such as Apache Software Foundation's Struts open source framework for building Java apps and OpenSymphony's WebWork Java Web app dev framework.
JSF is a bit too geared toward hiding complexity, which can be a turnoff to seasoned developers, according to Jason Carreira, a developer of the open source WebWork framework for Java.
"That's not the way hard-core developers like to work," Carreira said.
Contrasting WebWork with JSF, Carreira said WebWork has had components that can be placed on a Web page and customized by editing a template; JSF, however, requires that a new renderer class be written to perform this function.
JSF is intended to provide unity in Web development on Java via its API, said Craig McClanahan, a senior staff engineer at Sun who has been involved in developing both JSF and Struts.
"We want to establish an ability to have a component marketplace and in order to do that, you really need a single API that everybody writes to," McClanahan said. Components could range from buttons and text fields to components that perform background communications to a server for partial page refreshes.
McClanahan acknowledged that JSF is intended to attract the more corporate-type developers familiar with Visual Basic. Developers, though, can use JSF components and maintain investments in existing applications built on other frameworks, according to McClanahan. But new development ought to take place on JSF, since it is becoming the mainstream standard, he said.
McClanahan said he has proposed a next generation of Struts, dubbed "Shale," which is based on JSF being present in the environment. Acknowledging resistance to JSF, McClanahan said there is always pushback on any new API.
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