Microsoft increases the cost of support services for Visual Basic 6, prompting one development-tool vendor to offer a competing product free through April 15.
Microsoft on Friday increased the cost of support services for Visual Basic 6, a move that has angered some developers and prompted one development-tool vendor to offer a competing product at no charge.
As of April 1, Microsoft ended free professional telephone and online incident support and free critical updates, according to a posting on the company's MSDN site for developers. Both services, however, would be available for a fee through March 2008, when all support would stop.
In addition, Microsoft stopped issuing VB6 service packs, which comprise the latest collection of product fixes.
Microsoft's decision to stop what it calls "mainstream" support for VB6 angered thousands of developers who complained that the software giant did not provide adequate tools for migrating applications written in the older language to Microsoft's latest platform, .Net.
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