I'm wondering if anyone can help me. My company is in the process of making the decision of migrating an existing application written in VB6 to .NET. I am presenting a list of risks around keeping VB6 to help make their decision in switching to .NET. Risks around VB6 include the following:
With regards to security, I have been asked to expand on this. The application is internal and won't be exposed to the customer. With this in mind, it will sit behind the company security infrastructure, so will this decrease the issue of security? Also, are there any more risks apart from the above which I have not considered?
The main risk with keeping a VB6 application is future maintainability. The VB6 runtimes aren't going anywhere, so any VB6 application should continue to run. However the VB6 IDE has been increasingly flaky within was any OS after XP requiring a few hacks to get it to install and run properly. Additionally finding skilled developers will get harder and harder with fewer people willing to work on such an outdated technology.
Many many things can be done with ease in .Net that are a royal pain in VB6. The potential gains are well worth the short term pain IMHO.
(Currently working on converting my companies core VB6 app to .Net)