I've been making some changes to a small VB6 application recently. On the weekend I received the updated source from the customer, unzipped it and opened the project.  I tried to load the main form, frmMain.frm and bingo, VB6 crashed.

Hmmm, me thinks, that's weird, lets try that 15 more times and see if it still fails... yes, it does.  Lets try opening the last version of the source that used to work.  Hmmm... does the same thing.  Strange.  Backtrack.  What has changed?  I wonder if it was SP6 that I installed in between times?  Email customer, ask them to try.  Yes, works for them OK.  Crap.

So, I tried to remove SP6 and that didn't help.  In fact it made things worse.  I then tried to remove and reinstall VB6 and it got even worse!  Eventually, I managed to get VB to create a LOG file for the main form and it told me that MSCOMCTL.OCX could not be loaded.  Crap!  DLL hell!

To cut a long story short, I managed to get it all working again by installing the application from it's setup, which overwrote the stuffed DLL's/OCX's with the correct versions.  4 hours later I was working again.

All this got me wondering, why do some people still love VB6?  Have they simply forgotten how bad DLL hell was? Do they never use OCX's?  Do they never have to deploy these applications?

I must admit, that once it's working, VB6 is very quick to knock together a simple application and it's very easy to update other peoples code.  I particularly like that pressing F5 actually runs the application before I can make a coffee and iron a shirt!

However, 1 day of DLL hell is enough to convince me that I made the correct decision in choosing .Net.  Sure, it's more complex and I don't have to maintain or migrate large VB6 apps, but would you rather cruise down the motor way in a Model T or a BMW 7 Series?