Upgrade VB6 application to Visual Basic 2008

Question

Hi,

I've got a VB6 application, and i want to develop it with Visual Studio 2008. The problem i've got is the upgrade wizard. By starting the wizard it's working ok. But when the parsing process is running it take 100% of the CPU and keeps on the same status: Parsing form.

It's running for several days.

How can i migrate the application on a right way? There are a lot of other tools. They are not free, so can't test if they work.I'me not sure about that because Visual Studio is also hanging by parsing.

Any idea's?

Answer 1

Sounds like the upgrade wizard is failing on one of your forms. WinForms is very different to the old VB6 form envinronment, so your forms may not upgrade correctly anyway.

I'd suggest decoupling your old VB6 forms from the rest of the codebase and splitting them out into a separate project. Then you should be able to run the upgrade wizard on the main body of your codebase and create the UI from new.

This may or may not be a huge task, depending on how UI-centric your VB6 application is and how closely-coupled your UI is to the rest of the codebase.

Have you read through any of Microsoft's guidelines for preparing for the upgrade?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbrun/ms788233.aspx

Answer 2

Sounds like a bug in the upgrade wizard. Make sure the development machine has everything necesary installed, including design-time licenses for any 3rd party components (can you compile the VB6?). If the machine is set up properly I think you should contact Microsoft technical support.

There's lots of good advice on migrating, including this great Microsoft page, and a lot of good discussion on StackOverflow.

Answer 3

VBDepend can help to understand the existing vb6 code before migration, and accelerate the process during migration.