[frik]

There was, called Visual Basic 6 (1998), the best RAD tool for Windows back then. It's the full version of limited VBA that comes with Office. Instead of releasing a version 7, Microsoft scarified it in favor of dotNet Framework idea.

Hundreds of thousands developers are still pissed at Microsoft in 2014 (according to Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic

(I moved on to various other languages, but I still have VB in fond memories.)

[bsder]

And yet, despite millions (I'm being nice, probably billions) of lines of VB6 code, not one single competitor has managed to build a business out of creating a 100% Visual Basic 6 compatible system.

Looks like Microsoft was correct in their assessment of shooting VB6. Nobody using it was willing to pay money.

[frik]

VB was all about COM technology. It suits perfectly to work on and extend Windows and Office applications. Migrating to another RAD tool like Delphi or varous *Basic or even VB.net is not possible without starting more or less from scratch. As no other RAD tool offer compareable compatibility and most even do not support or are COM based.

[bsder]

Hogwash. It's perfectly reasonable to make something that would be compatible. It's not even that hard.

There's just no money in doing so.

People used VB6 because it was easy and cheap. They're not going to suddenly turn around and start spending 7 figure sums of money. They'll just hobble along until they don't make a computer that can run VB6 and Windows XP any longer.

[bosveld]

I moved from VB6 to Python.