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I used VC6 every day right up until August 2004 when I left Sonardyne. By then, it was well overdue for retirement on that project...the only reason we carried on using it was that it was "a known risk" with zero impact on our build/deployment.
Unfortunately that known risk included the knowledge that daring to open the Class View would crash the IDE, and even loading a workspace was touch and go. The IDE just wasn't designed to deal with a workspace of that size (80 projects and something like 4000 implementation files).
Then of course there was the non-standards compliant compiler, outdated ATL support (if you've used VS2003's ATL7 you'll know what I mean) and the lack of compile time checking on MFC message handler signatures. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
These days I generally only use VS6 when I'm working on a legacy project or (of course) testing one of our add-ins with it (ResOrg has supported it from day 1 of course, and we have a version of Visual Lint in development which runs with it as well as VS2002, 2003 and 2005). Every time I do it feels like a frustrating experience...compiler issues aside, the lack of control the user has over the UI (want to see the File View and the Resource View at the same time? You can't) is annoying. The only thing they seem to have got right is the dialog editor...but then on closer inspection it doesn't support extended dialog styles. More Ouch.
As an add-in author I also have another perspective on it. Writing add-in products for VS6 is a pain - the automation interface is truly pathetic by comparison with VS2002 onwards. Even simple things like showing the status of a toolbar button or implementing a toolwindow aren't possible without diving directly into the innards of the IDE using undocumented features and low level techniques such as hooks and subclassing. Yuck. 
Given all that, you can keep VS6. I'm sticking with VS2003. 
Anna ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint 
Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter
"Be yourself - not what others think you should be"
- Marcia Graesch
"Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart"
- A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
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I still use VC6 IDE for my employer's C++ product suite, but only because I haven't gotten round to rebuilding the projects in VS2003. It's mainly as case of "its not broken so lets not make work until its really necessary". I've done the conversion on my own image processing software (www.pixcl.com) and its pretty straightforeward, almost (but not quite) seamless.
Stewart DIBBS
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agreed. I use VC6 because I have to in my job. If it were only up to me , I would have stayed with Borland's Xbuilder.
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Well I use VC6 from choice. Albeit with the Intel v9 compiler. I find the user interface of 2003 and 2005 visually unacceptable. I do have a slight visual impairment, being in the geriatric brigade of coders, and I find the simple visual interface of VC6 far superior to any of the later offerings, despite all the wizzy tweaks they have to offer. I have spent time trying tweak the appearance to my needs, but have systematically failed.
I'd look at other IDEs, but I'm not going to do without Visual Assist, unless I really have to.
Rob in the West Riding
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I would love to switch to OCaml but there is no demand for it, so yes I am "still" in C++ waters. Not even the sad fact that VBers took over Code Project can make me change my mind about it 
Anyway to answer the question: on Windows side, it is VC++ 2005. On Linux side, it is gvim + ctags + gcc 4.02. I enjoy both. Microsoft IDE has a great debugger, but gvim is a better editor.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
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Nemanja
For .NET, are you still using the 2003 MC++ syntax? Or have you moved to 2005 C++/CLI?
Regards,
Nish
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote: For .NET, are you still using the 2003 MC++ syntax?
Still on 2003 MC++ syntax. The reason is that we are getting rid of .NET alltogether and it just doesn't make sense to upgrade it at this point. Maybe if MS finally releases mscfront, I take a day or two and upgrade it.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: The reason is that we are getting rid of .NET alltogether
Hmmmm, interesting. I haven't heard anyone else say that
Regards,
Nish
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote: Hmmmm, interesting. I haven't heard anyone else say that
It simply did not work for us. .NET is a platform for data-centric business applications, but we are developing natural language processing software. It turned out that 90% of core work still needs to be done by native C++ code, and adding .NET on top of that makes little sense. Also, Linux has become a very important target platform, and Mono is too risky to rely on at this stage.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
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Ah ok. That makes sense.
Regards,
Nish
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We have about 60 clients running our software on about 50,000 machines. At user group meetings, it has been made very clear to us that anything other than native code is completely unnaccetable to them. It isn't all that long since the last Windows v3.1 machine was removed from the list. We know there are still a lot of Win98 around, and I suspect (with some supporting evidence) that there are Win95 systems around, but not admitted to.
We asked, "What if you all ran XP?". Answers were the same, no CLI. A reasonable percentage said that they'd rather we produce a Linux solution than go down that route. Though I don't see that happening any time soon.
Rob in the West Riding
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Michael P Butler wrote: My last remaining C++ product is maintenance only, and that is done using VC6.
We are not all independent consultants, Michael. Some of us can't just choose to do what we think is exciting! 
Regards,
Nish
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote: We are not all independent consultants, Michael. Some of us can't just choose to do what we think is exciting!
If I wanted exciting, I'd be still coding in C++. I miss the excitement of tracking down that missing delete 
I choose the best tool to do the job. C#, just happens to be the best tool for writing my business apps.
If I was still doing major telephony work, I'd be using C++. (VS 2003 is the last version I used for my telephony apps, although I used to use VC6 to create the initial COM object because ATL was so much simpler in those days)
Michael
CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]
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Michael P Butler wrote: I miss the excitement of tracking down that missing delete
Oh man.. then you should witness the ACTION when you use an already deleted pointer, a.k.a dangling SOB. Everytime that happens, I put on the party hat and celebrate with my office mates.
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Visual Studio 6 is still the best with Visual Assist and WndTabs 
#define __ARMEN_H__
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Compilation and standard compliance sucks. Try using the boost library and you are screwed.
well it works.. but it is dog slow.
and the STL ist pretty basic (means pretty bad) too.
Are the newer Visual Studio versions faster ?
[Mine uses jsut 256 MB of rams, altough I've got 1GB, so compilation time really sucks. And those freakin Internal Compiler errors when using boost library].
Well.. thanks for venting.
WndTabs rock.
All the label says is that this stuff contains chemicals "... known to the State of California to cause cancer in rats and low-income test subjects."
Roger Wright
http://www.codeproject.com/lounge.asp?select=965687&exp=5&fr=1#xx965687xx
-- modified at 5:04 Monday 30th January, 2006
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I am also stuck for some projects using the good old Visual Studio 6.
And I also use boost a lot. But no problems there.
And for the STL thing: Use stlport (www.stlport.org[^])
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Odd. I always had the problem with internal compiler errors, when using the tokenizer library, for example.
Rebuilding the project and the internal compiler errors went away (sometimes).
But then I used the project from codeproject (which was the basic version what became the tokenizer lib), and this works fine.
Well I know stlport, but FOR me the stl - library of VC6 is doing fine (altough I'd prefer a more complete version)
My biggest gripe is that I have got a new machine with 1 GB of ram and VC6 still didn't get really faster. (the more templates the worse).
And I wanted to know if the newer Visual studios are faster when compiling.
All the label says is that this stuff contains chemicals "... known to the State of California to cause cancer in rats and low-income test subjects."
Roger Wright
http://www.codeproject.com/lounge.asp?select=965687&exp=5&fr=1#xx965687xx
-- modified at 5:34 Monday 30th January, 2006
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Boost is a real pain to get working but parts of it do work with vc6...
For STL. I have been using stlport for many years and it works great. Besides having a more complete stl the debug iterators really help debugging by throwing execptions when you do something wrong with an iterator. This feature alone has saved me many days debugging time...
John
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Despite of VisualAssist (it really rocks!) the new 2005 IDE is the multitool you have to own.
Newer used 2002 oder 2003? The its definitivly the best choice. Better debugging support. Better what ever you want! So what is the valuable add vc6 owns?
Live is to short to be angered about lost chances!
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VS6 IDE is lean and fast, but the compiler is way out of date.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: VS6 IDE is lean and fast, but the compiler is way out of date.
Yep, exactly!
Regards,
Nish
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The IDE is fast until you load a large workspace (say about 80 projects). Then it really, really struggles - or crashes entirely.
Anna ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint 
Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter
"Be yourself - not what others think you should be"
- Marcia Graesch
"Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart"
- A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
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You are only thinking of the IDE. The VC++ 6 compiler sucks!!!
Regards,
Nish
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