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Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

In other words, migrating VB6 applications to .NET just got easier.

When VB.NET was released several years ago, there were tons of complaints from die-hard VB6 users because VB.NET was so radically different and there was no easy way to move a VB6 application to the .NET platform. My personal opinion is that I am happy with the road Microsoft took to VB.NET. Sure it was a radical departure, but it was absolutely necessary to make VB a first-class language on .NET. My opinion.

That said, there's no doubt there isn't an easy way to move your code from VB6 to .NET. To date, the most effective way to do this if you have a large application has been a total rewrite in .NET. So what's the solution? Enter Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 just released by Microsoft as part of a Visual Basic 2005 Power Pack.

What is it and what does it do? ...

Well, it allows a VB6 Windows application to open .NET Winforms. This allows you to progressively convert your VB6 forms to .NET over time. As you replace VB6 forms with .NET forms, your end-users don't know anything about it. The application they are familiar with continues to work the same way it always has (provided your .NET forms are built properly).

For my company this is a big deal. We have 3 big applications written in VB6 that we sell to the government sector. Porting these to .NET has been on our minds for the past few years, but the idea of rewriting them from scratch is daunting. Quite frankly, most of what we need to do with these applications runs just fine in VB6 so long as Microsoft continues to include the VB6 runtime in the Windows OS, which I believe they will. I'm told Vista has the VB6 runtime so our apps will continue to work over the next 3-5 years for certain. That said, in the past year as we try to sell our application, every once in a while an IT person pipes up and asks when we're moving our application to .NET.

Although VB6 does the trick for the most part, I long for the day when I can work with pure .NET. The productivity gains I've seen as a .NET guy over my former VB6 self are so evident.

The Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 is exciting to us. We can begin to port our code incrementally over time and eventually we'll be totally .NET. Let there be no doubt that this is still going to be a big job, but we can work on porting our app to .NET over time with incremental releases and new features and our customers will benefit from them. We won't have to maintain 2 sets of code. We also now have a good .NET story to present to the IT people when we are selling our software. Win-win all around. IT people like it and the end-users aren't interrupted.

I've been playing with the Interop Toolkit for the past few days now and I'm impressed with how easy and effective it is to use. I'm almost positive it can do all we need it to do. I need to do a little more testing and explore how we can deploy this to over 200 customers, but it seems the road to go down.

I'm interested to hear from anyone who is using this. If you're in a similar predicament, I suggest you have a good look at this tool.

NOTE: For a really good, in-depth, discussion of this tool have a listen to this .NET Rocks show from Carl Franklin. Well worth the listen.

Tags VB.Net Microsoft .Net VB6 VB6 Migration Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

posted by John Walker @ 9/24/2006 1:55:00 AM

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Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

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