Ecosystem · 11
Where Classic VB Lives On
Microsoft ended support in 2008. The community, in the manner of communities, simply declined to notice.
01The forums that never closed
The watering holes of the classic era, long-running Visual Basic forums with their sprawling VB6 sections, are, several of them, still open for business. Threads from 1999 sit inches from questions posted this month, which gives the best of them the quality of a building with all its construction eras visible: advice on 16-bit issues in the basement, twinBASIC discussions in the new wing. The depot's advice to a returning veteran: the search box is your time machine; most questions you would ask were answered, definitively, while you were away.
Meanwhile the question-and-answer archives (Stack Overflow's vb6 and vba tags chief among them) accumulated, over fifteen years, what amounts to the largest peer-reviewed corpus of classic VB knowledge in existence. The vba tag in particular ranks among the most followed language tags on the platform, a fact that surprises nobody who has ever worked in a finance department and everybody else. The scale of the still-living practice is documented from the product side in the VBA deep dive.
02The spreadsheet nation
Numerically, the center of gravity of living Visual Basic is not VB6 at all but VBA, and its capital city is the spreadsheet community: Excel-focused forums where macro questions are answered around the clock, YouTube channels with subscribers in the hundreds of thousands teaching Range objects and dictionary patterns, and whole publishing categories of books that quietly assume their readers program in Basic inside Office. This is the largest beginner-to-practitioner pipeline left standing from the classic VB world: the direct cultural descendant of the one the Cooper-era product built, as described in the history.
03Archives, repos and attics
Around the edges operates the preservation crowd. Code archives from the golden age of shareware circulate through retro-computing communities; the code-sample sites of the nineties survive as Wayback specimens, their thousand-snippet troves half-intact; GitHub hosts everything from earnest utility libraries to lovingly boxed museum pieces. The depot does its own small part with the code depot. If you hold a stash of vintage .frm and .bas files, the community answer is always the same: scan it, archive it, share it (software history is preserved in attics or not at all).
04twinBASIC: the heir project
The most consequential development in the classic world this decade is twinBASIC, an independent compiler project announced in 2019 with a direct ambition: 100 percent compatibility with VB6 and VBA source, plus what the original never had (64-bit compilation), a modern IDE, and continued evolution. Its significance is best understood against the history that produced it: after the rupture chronicled in the Great Split, classic VB codebases had nowhere to grow (only to run), per the arrangement described in the VB6 deep dive. twinBASIC's bet is that "compile your 2003 project natively on a current machine" is a product with a market. The project has spent its life in public beta, shipping steady compatibility milestones to an engaged community, an operational risk profile to weigh honestly, and the most serious attempt yet to give the classic dialect a future rather than a museum.
Asking a classic VB question in 2026: state your dialect (VB6, VBA, VBScript (they diverge), see the family map in the timeline), your host and version, and what you already tried. The old hands answer gladly; what they don't answer is a question they last answered in 2004 and can find in ten seconds.
A language dies when its last running program stops. By that measure, reports of Visual Basic's death remain greatly exaggerated.