Opening vbp Visual Basic Project

Question

I have got some old sources written in Visual Basic. There are *.bas, *.cls, *.frm and *.vbp files. As I understand, vbp is a project file. But I cannot open it with my Visual Studio 2008.

What version of VS should I install to open *.vbp file? Google says it is Visual Studio 6, but I am not sure and I cannot find Visual Studio 6 for downloading. Is there any publicly available free edition of Visual Studio 6 with Visual Basic?

Thanks.

Answer 1

vbp is indeed a VB 5/6 Project File.

VS6/VB5/VB6 are not free, so if you want to build the project you will need to spend $5 on ebay.

The VB5 Control Creation Edition (build COM components only) was the only free version MS released.

Older versions of VS.net included a way to import a VBP and upgrade it to VB.NET, but YMMV (significantly).

Edit; If you just want to look at the source/project structure all the files except .frx are plain ascii.

Answer 2

If you have an MSDN subscription, then VB6 is available as a free download. Otherwise try ebay like Alex suggests, but it usually costs significantly more than $5.

Answer 3

When opening the vbp file which is the project file, you will most likely have an import wizard show up, which after trying to import the project it will likely tell you there are a bunch of dependencies vb6 used to use which .net does not and will error out. You need to have vb5/6 installed or at least the dependency files installed in order to proceed with the import. You can view source code from the plain ascii text files of the .frM files.