Upgrading Visual Basic 6.0 Applications with Visual Basic .NET 2003 - Guidelines for Upgrade
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The Visual Basic .NET upgrade wizard does not upgrade all parts of a Visual Basic 6.0 application. You will have to manually update the application if certain features of Visual Basic 6.0 have no equivalent to Visual Basic .NET. Visual Basic .NET does not support the following listed features of Visual Basic 6.0:
OLE Control:
This control is popularly called as OLE container control. VB.NET does not contain this control. However, you can make use of WebBrowser control as an alternative.
Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE):
You can use the SendMessage API instead of DDE methods.
DAO and RDO data binding:
DAO stands for Data Access Object and RDO stands for Remote Data Object. They are accessed through code with the help of Data control in Visual Basic 6.0. Visual Basic .NET does not support these two data binding concepts. You should either use Active Data Objects (ADO) before upgrading, or convert the entire code to ADO.NET after completing the upgrade.
Visual Basic 5.0 Controls:
Visual Basic 6 ships with lot of VB 5 controls such as Microsoft Windows Common Controls and the data bound grid control. VB.NET doesn’t support these controls. It is better to leave them without upgrading or use the equivalent .NET controls such as DataGrid.
DHTML Applications:
You can develop DHTML applications using Visual Basic 6.0. These applications cannot be upgraded by Visual Basic .NET. It is better to leave these applications in their VB 6.0 versions.
ActiveX Documents:
The VB.NET upgrade wizard cannot upgrade ActiveX documents developed using Visual Basic 6.0.
Property pages:
VB.NET does not support property pages, because you can easily make use of the Windows Forms property browser.
User controls:
You can use User controls developed using Visual Basic 6.0 in your Visual Basic .NET applications, but .NET does not provide design-time support. Hence, you can make modifications to User controls only by using Visual Basic 6.0
WebClass Applications:
These applications will be upgraded to ASP.NET with an upgrade warning. You should review those warnings before deploying your project. You should further note that WebClasses interoperate with VB.NET Web Forms in a flexible manner.
Summary
You have now attained the knowledge to upgrade a Visual Basic 6.0 application to .NET. This article also examined some of the core issues associated with the upgrade. I hope this article helped you to decide whether to upgrade your existing Visual Basic 6 applications into Visual Basic .NET 2003.
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