Why would you want to buy the VB6 IDE? If you’ve got legacy VB6 stuff to maintain, you’ve probably got a 20-year-old license for the IDE already. If you somehow do not, you can buy a Visual Studio subscription [0] and get it. Supporting something does not necessarily mean they sell new licences.
well, if it's so great that you can run old apps, what if one of those old apps you run, you want to make a tiny change to it?
but there's gonna be security issues.
still it shows that Microsoft's legendary (albeit narrow) backward compatibility doesn't really mean a whole lot, except for sounding cool
> you’ve probably got a 20-year-old license for the IDE already
As for this, no, someone could pick up an old app written by someone else, or lost their copy of the license, or maybe the license belonged to a company they no longer work for. Also it apparently doesn't apply to the person asking the question...
You can get a copy of the VB6 IDE with a Visual Studio subscription if you really need it. It works on Windows 11 — you can search for "visual basic 6 windows 11" on YouTube to see it in action (I’m not linking to any videos, since those videos tend to suggest less legal ways to acquire software).
I don’t understand your problem with the tool being available in a VS subscription.
> Because of Microsoft. Microsoft is being unhelpful here as usual
Windows 11 can be bought in many places, including microsoft.com. All you need is a spare $140 or so. People pirate it anyway. Is Microsoft being unhelpful by expecting payment for software?
[0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/#software-a... > "Download complete list of software" lists VB6 as available.