Posts by LesF

When I last made an installer for a VB6 application I used the nullsoft installation creator, which is very flexible and useful. I believe you can include a DLL with methods to be executed as part of the installation process, which could then be used to verify license keys and store some authentication data in the registry or elsewhere.

As for database access, yes you can do that still, you need to reference ADODB, which you may need to install if it is not present, and you can connect to all sorts of databases. At work I still support some old VB6 code which uses Sql Server for both SQL queries and stored procedure calls.

There are free versions of Visual Studio, providing C#, VB.Net and a bunch of other languages which can now be used with .Net, including Python (search for Visual Studio Express).
Your decision should depend on your requirements tho; are you doing web pages, or do you want client based applications, if so, do you want a user interface which runs on a specific OS or do you want it to run on many.
I have been reading about QT5 and their QML markup language for UI, and this is looking quite attractive, as well as being multi-platform. However I have not started to do any coding in it yet so I cannot really judge. Give it a try if you were ever fond of C or C++.
Personally I would stay well away from the old VB6, it had its day but is not the nicest way to write code any more. I'm not a hater, I used it extensively for quite some time, but newer languages let you do more with less code.