Visual Basic 6 in the year 2026: A call to Microsoft

C# as a programming language is by no means worse than VB6, not even VB.NET.

But: the IDE feels like a step back into the stone age for a VB6 developer:

1. It lacks the magical debugging capabilities that made "live programming" in VB6 a real booster for programming: You start with a draft, and optimize it at runtime.
2. .NET unites what feels like hundreds of technologies under one roof, but the overloaded interface puts off any newcomer or switcher right from the start and the learning curve for familiarizing yourself with the IDE is huge.
3. The .NET IDE feels much less responsive and to start a small Hello World app, it can take 10 seconds of compilation time before a simple program even starts...
4. The .NET IDE seems to be extremely resource-hungry. Quickly installing a .NET development environment on a Surface Laptop with 250GB of hard disk space quickly resembles a spit-route when it comes to freeing up the required resources.

My call to Microsoft: VB6 must become OpenSource so that it can be further developed by the community and transferred to the year 2026.

VB6 lives on in the year 2026

The community has never given up on Visual Basic 6. Kr00l carried over the Microsoft Common Controls often used in VB6 into 2026 and made the same components completely DPI-aware and Unicode/UTF-8 capable.

TwinBasic is developing into a startable 64-bit compiler even for existing programs. The community's approach is commendable and extremely ambitious, especially because nobody has access to the VB6 source code and the community has to develop everything from scratch.

Unfortunately, the approach is actually so ambitious that it is worth asking: what other alternatives do we actually have?

Many of VB6's weaknesses, such as true multithreading, could be solved in 2026 with additional Rust components that could be docked if required.

The level of OOP in Visual Basic is an ingenious compromise between reducing complexity and the optional use of classes as containers of methods and data where it really promotes efficiency in programming. This approach should not be changed at all.

The installer for the VB6 IDE could and should be completely rebuilt, for example with Inno Setup.

Complete DPIAwareness, full UTF8 capability and even a 64-bit compiler could be built directly into the VB6 source code.

Where VB6 still calls Ansi methods in the Win32 API (e.g. WriteTextA), we could replace these with UTF8-capable W methods (WriteTextW).

We, the community, would take over this task and carry the ingenious approach of Visual Basic 6 into the year 2026. Because none of the former VB6 fans are currently using Visual Basic .NET with any real passion.

And this must be an admission for Microsoft: the decision to discontinue VB6 and position .NET as its successor has failed.

Many of the remaining VB6 developers will have to slowly reorient themselves, lose patience and then slowly but surely move on to Linux and Rust.

Or Microsoft will release the Visual Basic 6 source code and we, the community, will bring this ingenious development environment for Windows into the year 2026.

The latter would be a big win for the community, for developers, for users and even for the entire technology industry.

And last but not least, it would be a big plus for Microsoft, as the decision to make the source code for Visual Basic 6 available as open source will also boost Microsoft's reputation and bring back many fans & developers, and bind them to the Microsoft ecosystem.

That would be a serious win for Microsoft I would say.