Stan Lippman's VC6 rant

It’s been a busy week. We got back from Verbier on Saturday and I’d hurt my knee, so I was sad, and limping and slow. I then had a mass of things to do to finish all of my client obligations by today. I collected up some blog postings that I was going to reply to, when I got a moment, and now I have a moment I find that one of them has vanished…

Edit: Yay! for the Wayback machine ;) Here’s the original posting: http://web.archive.org/web/20041211175803/http://blogs.msdn.com/slippman/ Something that I didn’t mention at the time was the passion that Stan was displaying; for all his lack of understanding as to why it was hard for some people to move from VC6 at the time. You can’t fault him for how passionate he is about his work and his product!

My copy of SharpReader tells me that Stan Lippman had written a blog posting on 9th Dec about how he’s annoyed (to say the least) about how some people haven’t moved from VC6 to the latest, greatest version that everyone has been working really hard on… An understandable sentiment from someone who’s intimately involved in a project, but, perhaps a little out of character - I guess he had one of those wine moments that I have sometimes… ;) The posting has now disappeared, which is a pity as I now have nothing to link to

Anyway, the point is, Stan would like us all to move to VC.Latest and some of us haven’t.

The problem is that for those of us who have to provide clients with code and project files for version X of Visual Studio it’s not actually that easy for us to upgrade. Due to the way that later versions of Visual Studio can read earlier versions of project files it’s easier to actually work in the earliest version that you need to support and then simply let the tools create the later versions of the project files when you need them for a client who has upgraded.

Stan, if you want people like me to upgrade to the new compiler and use it as my tool of choice then you need to have the new compiler’s IDE support writing out backward compatible project files. An add-in will do. But I want to maintain ONE set of project files and if the only compiler that will let me do that is VC6 then I’ll stick with that as my tool of choice until my last VC6 client upgrades. If the latest, greatest version supported a “write out a set of VC6 project files” option (and preferably I’d be able to select VC6, VS7 and VS7.1 and whatever else and generate the lot all in one go…).