I occasionally get flak for the fact that my applications are mostly written in Visual Basic 6, a programming language that came out in 1998 and has since been replaced by Visual Basic.NET.

But I still use it to this day, and I have some good reasons why:

• It performs well. It's not as fast as a native C++ application, but it's probably about as fast as a C# application.
  
• I can create programs in it in the blink of an eye. I've been using it for so long and I know my way around it very well, and I can bang out a program in no time at all, with a full GUI.
  
• It's fully Active-X COM compliant. There are a million components and add-ons and plugins that are Active-X controls and interfaces, so that means it's real easy to use one of those.
  
• It can create Active-X COM DLLs too. These are usable in other languages including .NET.
  
• It doesn't require a massive runtime that is difficult to understand and easy to mix up, like .NET does. Sure, it still needs some DLLs, but they usually come with Windows or are rather small.
  
• It works fine on any version of Windows, including Windows 7 64-bit and Server, with no changes.
  
• Without too much pain, you can use pretty much any Windows API function, including stuff like keyboard hooks.
  

Of course, it does have some limitations, which may be a dealbreaker for some people:

• No 64-bit support. My apps run 32-bit, but of course they work fine on a 64-bit system.
  
• No real multithreading. This isn't really a huge problem for me either, as threading is a headache and a half.
  
• Fancy graphics and things like alpha transparencies and window subclassing aren't built in, like they are in .NET. So you need to go a bit further to get things like that working.
  

I do know C# and I use it every now and again, but I still find that VB6 provides the best time spent to results produced ratio for me.
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