Well you got to feel sorry for those that can’t accept that a love one is dying. No matter how much voodoo they try, they are not going to revive the body. COM was fundamentally flawed and Don Box published an article on that topic in MSDN Mag back in Dec. of 2000 and his final paragraph says it all:
So, Is COM Dead?
As this column has shown, the CLR provides significant benefits to developers who are using COM today. Virtually all aspects of the COM programming model have survived (interfaces, classes, attributes, context, and so on). Some may consider COM dead simply because CLR objects don't rely on IUnknown-compliant vptrs/vtbls. I look at the CLR as breathing new life into the programming model that I've spent the last seven years of my life working with, and I know there are other programmers out there who share this sentiment.
Well, it’s been 4 years since that article, and the grieving period should be over, and they should get on with their lives. If you want to stick with something that doesn’t change, go learn Mainframe COBOL.
But, there are some parts of the VB6 Petition that I do (sort of) agree with. Microsoft has not come forward with a public strategy on a replacement scripting language for .Net (and especially XAML). That is what I see as the underlying issue behind the problem. Microsoft does not have a replacement for the VB6 niche. Something that is more then a scripting language, but not as complex as OOP or .Net. Being able to code in an object oriented fashion would be nice, but should not be a must (for this niche). This new (or rehashed old language) should be able to be used within XAML docs without having to compile them to run (which is currently not the case in the early bits of XAML). I’ve been saying to base this language on ECMAScript and call it E Flat. A language that doesn’t have access to all of the .Net framework, and that runs only in partial trust mode. Maybe I’ll get around to writing up the details of what I’m thinking about, but for now, I just don’t have the cycles.
Oh, for those of you that don't know my history, I have coded in VB since VB3, and also worked as a mainframe COBOL programmer for about 7 years (in the mid to late 90's).
Update: Hansleman's killer statement: Set VB6 = Nothing
Update: (so everyone understands that support isn't ending) Microsoft's Product Family Life-Cycle Guidelines for Visual Basic 6.0