The VB6 development environment went into extended support in June of 2005. A couple of months before that, on March 8 of last year, a group of unhappy VB6 developers issued a document called "A Petition for the Development of Unmanaged Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications." By the end of that month, the creators of the petition had garnered more than 4,400 signatures, including 237 from MVPs. By now, the tally stands at over 10,000 names.

Although some developers might be mollified by Microsoft's efforts in the areas of VB6 migration and support over the past year, others are not. "Microsoft isn't making any changes to the VB.NET language, though, is it?" responded Jonathan Wood, founder of SoftCircuits, an MVP who signed the original petition, speaking with DevSource later.

"The community is still split into two camps," noted William Bell, a Windows developer based in New York City, in another interview with DevSource. "I'm getting into VB.NET, because it supports .NET features. But some of my friends want to stay with [the] VB6 [language]," according to Bell.

In last year's petition, the signers asked Microsoft to further develop both VB6 and VBA in line with three objectives: preservation of VB6 and VBA assets; continued support for the VB language; and ease of migration of unmanaged VB/VBA code to VB.NET.

"We believe that the best way to meet these objectives is for Microsoft to include an updated version of VB6 inside the Visual Studio IDE. For brevity we'll call this update 'VB.COM,'" according to the petition. "VB.COM should use the same keywords, syntax and types as VB6, remain COM-based, and compile to native code. Visual Studio would then support both unmanaged VB.COM and managed VB.NET, as it now supports both [unmanaged] C++ and [managed] C#."

Why are some developers adamant about keeping the core VB language and language intact?

"Some people still think VB6 is the best. They've put a lot of time into it over the years, and they don't want to have to learn something else," answered Bell.

But some industry analysts point out that leaving the VB language the same is something Microsoft just isn't going to do. "It was really 'tilting at windmills' to think anything else," said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.

Microsoft first pronounced its intentions to provide VB with a new language and syntax several years ago, affirmed Microsoft's Roxe. "It's what our customers want," according to the Microsoft exec. Customers are particularly drawn to the greater security and reliability of the .NET environment, along with support for new Web-based and mobile .NET apps, he contended.