Professional Visual Studio® 2008

46.3. Upgrading from Visual Basic 6

Since the introduction of .NET many years ago, one of the ongoing challenges faced by organizations is how to upgrade their existing Visual Basic 6 applications. Initially, Microsoft's guidance was to use the fairly primitive upgrade tool within Visual Studio to automatically upgrade the application. It was recommended that you run the application through the upgrade tool, look at the results, and make changes to the initial application to address areas that did not upgrade smoothly.

More recently, the thinking has evolved slightly, and with the introduction of a compatibility pack it is possible to integrate .NET components into existing Visual Basic 6 applications and vice versa. In a similar approach to upgrading ASP to ASP.NET, you can now progressively migrate parts of your application over time.

With this in mind, there is still a Visual Basic 6 to .NET converter that is accessible from the File Convert menu. Figure 46-6 shows the Convert dialog from which you can select one of the available converters. Visual Studio 2008 ships with a Visual Basic 2008 Upgrade Wizard, which as you can see is for upgrading Visual Basic 6 applications. Over time there are likely to be other converters made available to support the migration from other development platforms to .NET.

Figure 46.6. Figure 46-6

Stepping through this upgrade wizard will allow ...