Announcing VBUC 7.0

When you assign version numbers to software, you usually need a pretty good reason to change the first digit. 

Well today's one of those days.

VBUC 7.0, available now here, eliminates the need to have Visual Basic 6.0 installed on the same computer where you run the migration tool. This has historically been a challenge for lots of people, since their development machine (where they want to run the VBUC) is Windows 7 or newer, and their VB6 machine is possibly as old as XP. You CAN get VB6 to run on Windows 10 (I have it running on my HP Spectre 360) but it's not a great way to do it. 

With VBUC 7, the tool comes pre-loaded with metadata from the libs that are found in the latest service pack of VB6. So there's no need to have an actual instance of VB6 installed on your development machine any more to do the migration. 

What about other libraries? Using a 3rd party tool, you can extract metadata about type libraries that the VBUC can consume when those same binaries are on your VB6 machine. 

Better assessment data

Now the assessment component of VBUC will count and report more information about your VB6 project, including:

• Windows APIs (both in aggregate and individually with location info)
• Controls created in designers
• Unsupported files like Crystal Reports, DTC Designer, User Connection, etc
• Ambiguous reference identification--VBUC will flag references that can't be resolved as internal but appear to be for manual resolution.

Migration improvements

• FixedLengthString class has now been eliminated from generated code. 
• A bug where two files with identical names but different extensions were overwritten is now fixed.
• Some important internal improvements to the typing engine reduces compile errors even more than prior versions.
• Finding references sometimes is blocked by lack of admin rights to read the Windows registry; improvements in the reference resolution engine works around this and other problems.
• Further improvements to reduce the number of compile errors post migration were made, using about 800K lines of additional real world code.

Desktop or Web

Whether you want to move from VB6 to just a modern desktop app--running under .NET and using Winforms--or you really want to get with the 21st century and take your app all the way to HTML5, VBUC is a perfect tool. You can take the output, fix up the stuff that can't be migrated automatically, and you have a functioning .NET version with a new code base in either C# or VB.NET. 

But you can also use the output of VBUC as an intermediate step in a "double jump" scenario where the output (once it compiles) is used as the input to WebMAP--you'll get a modern Web app with your choice of Javascript frameworks on the client (Angular JS or KendoUI).

Available now

If you've got VB6 code to modernize, get a copy of VBUC 7.0 today. The free trial will let you run a migration on up to 10KLOC of VB6 code.