[vtkusers] Can we drop support for Visual Studio 7.0 and Borland 5.6?

[Berk Geveci]

Hi folks,

We are thinking of dropping support for Visual Studio 7 and Borland
5.6 (and older).
They are causing annoying maintenance issues since no one in the developer team
uses  them and since they support only a subset of modern C++ features. I am
looking for answers to the following questions:

* Do you need VTK working with VS 7.0 or Borland 5.6?
* Why can't you migrate to another compiler, such as Visual Studio 9
or Borland 5.8?

My understanding is that VS 7.0 has only minor improvements over VS 6 (mainly
the addition of the .NET framework but not to the C++ compiler) and
most people skipped
it when upgrading from VS 6. Borland 5.6 is very old and is no longer
supported. Please
let us know if you have any valid reasons why you are stuck with one
of these compilers.

Best,
-berk