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Question
Thursday, June 11, 2015 6:17 PM
I see a lot of differing opinions out there relative to this question,
Bottom line, I have a very simple VB6 project that monitors serial ports, parses data and sends it out another port. Can this be used in a Visual Studio 13 project? Or, should I just keep my XP machine with VB6 installed to support it? If I keep VB6, will the resultant EXE file run in windows 7?
All replies (3)
Thursday, June 11, 2015 8:56 PM âś…Answered | 3 votes
VB6 is by today's standards an ancient language dating back to 1998. It has evolved into VB.NET but the syntax and concepts have changed considerably. I'm very doubtful the upgrade wizard in VS 2013 is going to be very effective in updating the project, if at all. Be prepared for a hefty rewrite.
We have some VB6 projects in our organization, and we are quite content to keep an XP virtual machine around so that we can maintain these projects. They all run just fine under Windows 7.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether the upgrade effort is worth the payoff in moving the project into the .NET Framework. As you can tell, in our case, we have decided it isn't worth it. For example, we can deploy our VB6 executables without any dependency on the .NET Framework.
Friday, June 12, 2015 3:36 AM | 2 votes
Brian has given you excellent advice.
However, I can assure you that VS 2013 will not allow you to load or open a VB 6 project. IIRC, the last VS version that provided a VB 6 upgrade wizard was VS 2008.
I you want to try the wizard, you may still be able get the VS 2008 Express editions here )the one you want is VB 2008 Express):
Download the ISO from these orphaned links:
Just VS 2008 Express
VS 2008 Express SP1
Several sources have said that the ISO versions do not require registration.
Friday, June 12, 2015 6:04 PM
Thanks to both of you for the excellent advice. I think I will keep it in vb6.