VB6 Support Lifecycle - What happens on 31st March?

There seems to be some confusion about what's happening to VB6 on 31st March. Let me start by clarifying that support is not ending. After just over 6 years of "mainstream support"^*, on 31st March VB6 enters the "extended support phase"^*. In essence, this means no-charge incident support comes to an end and critical updates will be available for a fee. Other VB6 support offerings remain unchanged (eg paid incidents, premier support, free on-line self-help) until March 2008 (click here for full details). Note that the runtime is covered under the operating system support lifecycle so is unaffected by this change in status for VB6.

Jay Roxe (VB Product Manager) has more details on his blog here and here.

^*The concepts of Mainstream and Extended support were introduced as part of Microsoft's Support Lifecyle policy to provide consistent and predictable guidelines for product support availability at the time of product release.