The death of Microsoft Visual Basic 6 has been tremendously exaggerated as the saying goes. VB6 is still used as of today by developers that find it easy to use and can develop a quick 32 bit Windows application. The issues that pertain to VB6 are components that are no longer supported since either the vendors have gone out of business or no longer support VB6.
Visual Basic 6.0 (enterprise or professional) was released in 1998 and support was dropped in 2005. Since then Microsoft has pushed the Visual Basic.NET version that works with various Windows platforms but is extremely different then what the older VB6 Developer was use to.
There is a Visual Basic 6 petition available by clicking here.
The web site does have issues and doesn’t always work but if you could get your name on it, it would represent another developer whom wishes to let Microsoft know they made a mistake by not extending the life cycle of VB6.
There are still millions of applications designed and developed using VB6 and the migration with VB.NET was not always clean leading to many folks getting upset that the port over to the latest version just had way too many issues to fix instead of just maintaining the VB6 application.
Some of the gotchas working with a language that is over 10 years old that no longer has support is the older components or Crystal Reports 9 which was pretty much the last version that worked cleanly with VB6. Remember Sheridan ActiveX components well the company is gone but the components can still be purchased from Infragistics. Does that mean you should update your components, no it only means that they are available unless you are still selling products designed with VB6 then it may be a good idea to update for enhancements or bug fixes.
With Visual Basic 14 or Visual Studio 2015 coming out in the next few months I am sure people will upgrade their versions. Visual Basic 6 is still loaded on a Lenovo Windows XP notebook that allows maintenance on viable products developed with it.