Question

I’ve given a VisualBasic Software, written in VB5. Now the whole thing should run under Windows 7, so it needs to be converted to VB8 or VB9. It seems that most of the API of VB changed a lot in these years, so for me it seems quite impossible to run just a few code upgrades and everything is fine…

The biggest Problem are Forms. There are a lot of Forms in this Software, which are declared inside .frm files and begin always like this:

VERSION 5.00
Object = "{F9043C88-F6F2-101A-A3C9-08002B2F49FB}#1.1#0"; "COMDLG32.OCX"
Object = "{6B7E6392-850A-101B-AFC0-4210102A8DA7}#1.2#0"; "COMCTL32.OCX"
Begin VB.MDIForm frmMain 
   BackColor       =   &H00C0FFFF&
   Caption         =   "voice"
   ClientHeight    =   6990
   ClientLeft      =   165
   ClientTop       =   735
   ClientWidth     =   6990
   LinkTopic       =   "MDIForm1"
   StartUpPosition =   3  'Windows-Standard

It seems for me that this Stuff was generated with an UI-Layouter, so none self written code is in there.

Is it possible to run this code in VB8/9 or even rewrite it that VB8/9 understands it? I’m currently very pesimistic and think that the whole software needs to rewritten…

Answer 1

Reverse-engineer the VB code to a full functional and technical analysis.

Implement those in VB.NET.