The Official VB6 Apology Tour

18 Years of Regret (and How to Finally Escape)

It’s been exactly 18 years since Visual Basic 6 officially aged out of extended support. That means the End of Life date for VB6 is now old enough to vote, buy a lottery ticket, and join the military.

It’s time I issued a formal apology.

I was there. For two decades at Microsoft, I was the Product Manager for Visual Basic, working on it from version 1.0 all the way through the turbulent transition to VB.NET. At the time, we had a beautiful dream: democratize Windows development! Make it accessible! Just drag a button onto a form, double-click it, write a few lines of code, and boom! You have an app. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, we succeeded. We made it too easy.

We inadvertently empowered every rogue accountant, bored operations manager, and overly ambitious business analyst in 1999 to build mission-critical, duct-taped applications under their desks. And because those apps worked, they became the load-bearing pillars of the global enterprise economy.

So today, on this 18th death-versary, I want to say: I am sorry.

• I am deeply sorry for On Error Resume Next. We gave you a loaded gun and told you to aim at your own feet.
• I apologize for the psychological trauma of DLL Hell.
• I repent for the unregistered COM components that still haunt your infrastructure.
• And I am truly sorry that somewhere in your corporate network, there is still a dusty, wheezing virtual machine running a 26-year-old .vbp file that controls your entire supply chain, and your lead architect is too terrified to touch it.

Once again I've learned I should be banned from creating AI visuals

But here is the good news: the person who helped start the fire is now showing up with the best fire extinguisher on the market.

I helped bring this monster into the world, and now at GAPVelocity AI, it’s my job to help you take it out. We’ve evolved our legendary modernization technology to systematically untangle the spaghetti code I helped unleash. We don't just put a band-aid on your technical debt; we use advanced AI and proven agentic tools to rip out the ancient architecture and move those stranded assets to a modern, maintainable .NET or web stack.

You’ve white-knuckled your way through 18 years of unsupported legacy software. You’ve done your time. You don't have to live in fear of a Windows update breaking your entire business anymore.

Let’s finally put VB6 in the ground where it belongs. Reach out to us at Growth Acceleration Partners, and let’s start planning the funeral. I’ll even bring the donuts.