VB6 Legacy Project

RedXIV

Hey guys,

Hoping to get some advice here. I've been asked to look at an old VB6 application and seeing if I can either:

• Fix a few issues around memory and add 2/3 features
• Rebuild tool in modern language

I've never worked with VB6 and this is purely a hobbyist project, not something for work so it's not urgent so I'm happy enough to take my time but some direction at the beginning would be appreciated.

My first hurdle seems to be that VB6 is supported in windows 10 (current home machine) but the VB6 IDE is not. I will need to get a version of that working and I'm looking at an installer here -> http://nuke.vbcorner.net/. One concern I have about this is a warning that I need to remove all existing versions of visual studio before installing which would be a pain as I have 3 different installations already. So I may look into VM options also. If anyone has done this, I'd love some guidance and gotcha's to watch out for?

Also, noob question here, but if I wanted to add the existing project I've been given to github, I presume there will be no issues? There is a GUI to the project but I'm mainly interested in the backend code.

Appreciate all your help!

Red

srsly78

Modern VS has an upgrade wizard that can upgrade old vb6 to modern vb .net, give it a try.

CalamariFritti

We have some legacy VB6 apps that we look after, corporate environment. Which has its own challenges as VB6 and all the underlying stuff is long out of (Microsoft) support and in a corporate environment that is a hurdle in itself.

Anyway what we ended up doing is we built a 'sandbox' with all the old stuff. A designated laptop (if that was a home project I'd simply use a VM) with Windows XP, an old office version (our VB6 apps use some VB for apps stuff to do some 'office documents stuff') and the latest VB6 version plus some ancient InstallShield.
Its like going back in time when you log on to that thing but it turned out easier than trying to set up something on Windows 7 or 10 that has to make all sorts of concessions to overcome compatibility issues and in the end you could end up in DLL hell anyway.

banana_bear

The VB6 IDE has nothing in common with the modern VS IDEs and can be installed alongside with no issues. We have a wide range of legacy applications based on VB6 that we will have to maintain for a long time (customer specific stuff), along with our newer (.Net based) stuff. We still install VB6 on every development workstation, just as VS2017. We're using Windows 10 X64, no problem there.

To install:
- Download and extract the VB6 installer to a local drive
- Rightclick setup.exe, acmboot.exe and acmsetup.exe, go to compatibility, and set it to execute in compatibility mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 3)
- Install as usual

Afterwards install Service Pack 6, again by extracting the installer locally and setting compatibility on setupsp6.exe and acmsetup.exe first.

You will find that the mousewheel doesn't work in the IDE, you can download a fix for it (google VB6 mousewheel fix).

RedXIV

Cheers guys! Have got it running on my windows 10 machine now so I definitely appreciate the help First changes made for the project owner already. Thanks a million for your support!

Red

Jim2007

srsly78 wrote: »

Modern VS has an upgrade wizard that can upgrade old vb6 to modern vb .net, give it a try.

Nope definitely not!

RedXIV

Jim2007 wrote: »

Nope definitely not!

To be honest, now that i've started to review the project, I'd shudder to think what an automatic upgrade would do to the code

yop

RedXIV wrote: »

To be honest, now that i've started to review the project, I'd shudder to think what an automatic upgrade would do to the code

It makes a dogs dinner of it!!
Why they even consider telling people they can use it is beyond me!!

BrokenArrows

yop wrote: »

It makes a dogs dinner of it!!
Why they even consider telling people they can use it is beyond me!!

The automatic language conversion tools have their place for very simple applications which can be manually reviewed and "fixed" after the conversion.

However once the application gets even moderately large and complex you're just asking for trouble.

Tow

VS2008 is the last version which with 'automatically' update VB6 projects. But I believe there are 130 differences between vb6 and vb.net, so what you get is next to useless.