Why do developers still use VC6?

Tim Anderson asks why there are so many developers still using VC6…

Well, as I said before, if you produce C++ software in source code form and any of your clients require that you support VC6 then it’s often easier to maintain the project files in VC6 (and thus use that as your day to day development tool) than it is to use any of the newer compilers. The reason for this is that all of the newer releases will read and convert VC6 project files but none of them will write out project files that work with earlier releases.

I use VC.Latest when I can and VS 2005 is great for C++ development but it’s often just easier to manage a single set of project files and convert them to the required later compiler on demand… If there was a utility that could take C++ projects from any version of the compiler and produce project files for all the others then I’d use it; ideally it would provide warnings where features weren’t supported and the ability to do a bit of customisation - my VC6 builds go in Output\VC6, my VS2005 ones in Output\VS2005, etc…