I just found out that Real Software, the creators of an alternative to Visual Basic called REALbasic, have extended a free license to their REALbasic 5.5 Standard Edition package to all Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 users.  It seems that Real Software is leveraging the fact that Microsoft has discontinued support for their Visual Basic 6.0 product.

While, in days past I was a die-hard, very hardcore VB 6.0 programmer, I have not used a BASIC-derived language for just about 4 years since making the move to .NET as a C#/C++ developer.  I have a very soft spot in my heart for Visual Basic (not so much the .NET variety as I see it as a completely different language just slightly different than C# with respect to syntax due to a reliance on the .NET Framework), having worked exclusively with the language since version 2.0.

I don't have any experience with REALbasic, though I'll give it a whirl and see what it's all about, though I'll probably tend to agree with Bill McCarthy in that REALbasic after having read his review, that it's more of an alternative than an upgrade.  One aspect of REALbasic is that there is a Mac-variety.  Without yet diving into it, does anyone know if you can simply take your codebase and compile to Mac and have it run on the Mac OS?  That's pretty cool if it does.

Does anyone have any experience with it that can offer some good, insightful tidbits?