VB 6.0 Support Clarification

Two points from my previous blog that I was not totally clear on in my previous post so I wanted to highlight them.

First, during the Extended support period (April 1st on) if you have an MSDN subscriber or have a Premier or Alliance support contract the included free incidents do not expire and are valid through the extended support period.  I was a bit to vague and implied to some that these incidents would also expire.  This is not the case.

Second point of clarification for those of you with production code.  The VBRuntime ships in the box with Windows XP.  This means that the VBRuntime will continue in the Maintream support for 2 years for when ever Longhorn ships and 5 years after that point for Extended Support (7 Years total from the shipping of Longhorn which won't be tomorrow).  When we talk about the end of Mainstream support for Visual Basic we are talking about the development environment.  Since the runtime is part of Windows XP you have some time until this support stops.

So problems with your production applications will be supported for some time to come.  Problems with the development tool itself will continue for another 3 years.

Just so I don't start some other rumor, the VBRuntime ships with XP, this does not mean it won't work with Longhorn.  I have checked with the Development group and it will work with Longhorn.  See my comments in the VB 6.0 Support blog for more details.

I hope that clears things up a bit for more people.  Sorry for any confusion.