VB6 migrating to .Net with Visual Studio 2010

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Allan Simonsen picture Allan Simonsen · Jun 24, 2009 · Viewed 59.3k times · Source

Has anyone migrated a VB6 project to .Net with Visual Studio 2010?

I have tested the migration in VS2005, but the resulting .Net code was so messed up, that we decided not to migrate to .Net. So has the VS2010 migration wizard been improved over the wizard in VS2005 or VS2008?

Answer

Simon P Stevens picture Simon P Stevens · Jun 24, 2009

It certainly hasn't in 2008 and I'd be very surprised if it's any different in 2010.

VB6 and VB.net are totally different languages, and MS has never officially endorsed an automatic migration route for anything beyond simple applications. The migration path is non-trivial. There are several companies around that offer migration services, I haven't tried them but my advice would be manage it yourself.

We currently have several apps that are written largely in VB6. Our position is that existing working code is not migrated to .net without a good reason, but all new code must be written in .net (We've actually chosen C#)

What this means is that if we want to add a new feature to an existing VB6 app the feature must be implemented in .net with some interop. Gradually over time are apps are becoming more and more .net and less and less VB. We have 1 app that just has a tiny VB6 component now and the rest is almost entirely in .net thanks to this gradual migration approach. It has worked very well for us. Once we reach a stage where the VB6 portion is minimal, we simply manually convert the remaining code without high cost because there is only a tiny bit left.

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