just spotted this and figured I would up some defence of VC6.
Its a good IDE and a nice compiler. It is, imho, alot more light weight than the latest "pretty" IDE's, loads and runs faster and gets the job done nicely. It also, and this to me is important, compiles native win32 code out of the box without requiring a download of the huge platform sdk. Further more alot of people already own it and have been using it legitamatly for years and now can't afford to buy an entire new suite forcing us to go the route of 2005
EXPRESS and when I already own the enterprize studio of 6 this ends up being a damn
downgrade. Then I end up with an IDE which was designed with .NET in mind (to such an extend that i have to manually download and install win32 support!) and as i'm not interested in tying most of my stuff to the .net framework and simply trying to make native win32 dgsdk applications im then not using over half the features the new ide does have. Sounds like a pretty crappy deal to me.
I recently formated and installed 2005e and havnt reinstalled my 6 studio yet in an effort to try and get used to it. As far as typing code goes I quite like it and some of the formatting options are nice like tieing of brackets to their opening lines etc. But apart from that it was a pain to download, install and setup the win32 platform sdk (as if the fact it had to be installed wasnt bad enough, why the hell do I have to change 2005e's data files myself in a text editor? nice one!), I then I had a hellish time trying to convert my vc6 winapi programs over (level editors etc) due to weird error messages I had to google and find out what "new" thing was causing it in 2005 and there were PLENTY of further nuisiances like, to pick one example, not being able to double click an item like a dialog or whatever in the resource tab and have it open in an editor because it just brings up a note saying "not supported in visual studio 2005 express". Why thankyou.
So yes, im sure this isnt something people care about if they already own a proper edition of 2005, or if their college will give it to them or if they are willing to pirate it. But for people who cant get the enterprize or even standard editions of the software and already own an enterprize version of 6 we are now being forced to downgrade to an express version with a higher number - exactally identical to when for some game I had to upgrade my graphics card to support the latest shader version and all I could afford was the gf5200fx which, although a newer card which supported the latest thing, was so much worse than the old one when it came to general running and use and made everything else a slower and more painful experiance.
Anyway, just my little contribution. I doubt as the only person who sees a problem with loosing vc6 support that it will change anything, but I cannot personally approve of it unless tgc are going to start giving away free copies of vc2005 standard :/
