Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Microsoft InteropForms Toolkit 2.1 - .Net’ing in a VB6 world

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft InteropForms Toolkit 2.1

“Allows developers to incorporate VB.NET WinForms into their VB6 applications.

Version: 2.1
Date Published: 4/12/2010
Language: English
Download Size: 369 KB - 3.5 MB*


This toolkit helps you bring the power of .NET to your existing VB6 applications, by allowing them to display .NET Forms and Controls from within the same application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time. The goal is a phased upgrade, with production releases at the end of each iteration containing both VB6 and VB.NET forms running in the same VB6 .exe process.

…”

You’d like to think VB6 is behind us, wouldn’t you? Well the real world is an uglier place than any of us would like imagine… Believe me, I’m staring at some production VB6 code as I write this (sigh…)

While we all want to move to the latest and greatest, when your legacy code is helping keep the lights on, it’s a hard call to throw it out.

VB6 still has some legs and will be around yet for a few more years, yet that doesn’t mean we’re locked away from taking advantage of the goodness than is .Net. Case in point, the Microsoft InteropForms Toolkit…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Deploying a VB6 App when using the Interop Forms Toolkit
Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit Rev'ed to 2.0

2 comments:

Mark said...

Rather than mess around with -- to use your own words "icky" interop techniques and the complexity they bring to development, debugging, and deployment, I think people should put there money into learning how to do things the right way and into a process that can help them re-implement their systems efficiently. Great Migrations offers a tool-assisted rewrite methodology that enables this philosophy. Disclaimer: I have used approach and I started a company to promote it.

Anonymous said...

I agree, if you definitely can afford 20 grand for the conversion software! ;-)