It's time

to say an almost reluctant goodbye to Visual Studio 6. Hard to believe I've been using it for nearly 8 years. Of course I'll be keeping the install CD's around; you never know when you might need it, but I doubt I'll be reinstalling it on any of my personal machines ever again. Unfortunately we still need to keep it around until we can find the time to port our company codebase to something a little less venerable. Until we can find the time? I doubt that's going to happen until it's time to create an entirely new product from scratch.

It's been a good friend, has VS6, though it held me off learning STL for quite a while. I prefer all my projects to build at warning level 4 with warnings converted to errors and the only way you could achieve that feat was by disabling zillions of warnings. I didn't want to do that because it would turn them off for my code too unless I peppered my source with literally thousands of

#pragma warning(push)
#pragma warning(disable xxxx) 
.
. //  STL call that triggered warning xxxx
.
#pragma warning(pop)

blocks. An alternative was to modify the STL headers to hide all those pragmas but it's an article of faith for me that one does not mess with the headers that come with the development environment. (Nor does one EVER recompile the MFC DLL's - that way madness lies).

I know I'll miss ClassWizard but, on the other hand, I've been switching back and forth between VS6 and VS.NET 2003 for at least two years so I know I'll cope :)

Rest in Peace, VS6.