expletive inserted

My first programming internship used VB6 (1998), and it was great at the time. My first real job was mainly Classic ASP (2001), and I didn’t have a problem with that either. We just got back a proposal from a consulting company to revamp one of our aging CD-ROM based products and my jaw hit the floor when he suggested VB6 as the platform of choice. You have got to be fraking kidding me. Microsoft came out with the final version of VB6 in 1998 and is ending extended support this year.

This says a bunch of things to me about this guy. Mainly though it’s that he’s too damn lazy to learn anything new. Now, I must say, I’m not thrilled about keeping up with the changes in .NET that seem to happen on a daily basis, but most of the time these changes are meant to address some deficiency and it’s usually a fairly transparent process documented from a .NET team member’s blog.

What irresponsibility for the poor clients of yours that don’t know any better! I really thought this is was an April fools joke, but no. Sadly, it was a real proposal. One thing that I did notice from this was that MS has been pretty consistent about standardizing the naming of their products to include the year of projected release date. Office XP was really 2002 but since then it’s been Office 2003, Office 2007. NT4 gave way to Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003 and now 2008. Visual Studio 2003, 2005, 2008. Imagine if VB6 was actually named VB 98? Would anyone actually still try to sneak it into their client’s projects?

HPC: “Yeah, so we’ve determined VB 98 is the best solution for rebuilding this product.”

Client: “You mean VB 2008 right?”

HPC: “Nope, 98! I’m a fraking moron!”

Who knows though. I’m still wary about moving anything in our organization to Vista and XP is starting to show it’s age. Maybe someone will think I’m this big of an idiot one day, but if I ever get this lazy, someone should revoke my computing license.