Goodbye old friend

As of release 5.2.4, which is due for release in December, we will no longer support Visual Studio 6 builds of The Server Framework. I’ve recently had to deal with some weird multi-threaded problems for a client and upgrading them from Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio 2005 seemed to remove several STL related issues. I then did some research and decided that it simply wasn’t worth supporting the old compiler any longer if the first thing that I’d do if a client had problems would be to recommend they upgrade the compiler…

I’ve been using Visual Studio 6 since it came out in 1998 and up until the release of Visual Studio 2005 it was still my preferred development environment. IMHO the Visual Studio .Net releases simply added clutter and delay if you were developing in unmanaged C++. VC6 has been a pain to continue supporting for us as the language differences and lack of modern template support has been affecting the code that we can write for the other compilers. I’m sure this won’t be the last I see of VC6 though, I still have far too many clients which haven’t upgraded.