A giant more powerful than ever

[Haakon Birkeland]

Talk about us clinging to a sinking ship ...

I thought it was odd to get this kind of article in a feed Reader, since it had to be a fairly old article â€" but it ain't!

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/710181/Visual-Basic-6-0-A-giant-more-powerful-than-ever

[Knuth Konrad]

Why odd? I still use VB6 on a daily basis. It has become even more easy with Vista/Win 7, where the latest VB6 runtimes are shipped as part of the OS. Sparse use of OCX controls - if any at all - let's you achieve PB like "copy & paste" deployment.

There are also some interesting projects going on to enhance/keep alive VB6, such as http://www.vbrichclient.com/#/en/About/.

[Dave Wilson]

I just installed some of my existing vb6 software to Windows 8.1. I just had to register some activex controls - but it work perfectly. No issues. And fast. It amazes me how many custom controls are still being produced for the language.

[J P Eskdale]

I still use VB6 as the main language for an app that is sold 5K+ applications for my employer and is still be developed - It works great under XP Vista Win 7 and Win 8.1.  There are a few dll's written in PB that handle some of the manipulation of images and the multi-threading where its needed.
Nothing wrong with it and still easy to develop with plenty of OCX's to handle image capture and editing.

I went to a computer club meeting about 18 months ago where we had a visit from a well known Microsoft Evangelist.  He said - he personally feels that one of the biggest mistakes MS made was dropping VB6.

[Dave Wilson]

VB6 does require a runtime. However Microsoft has installed it on the computer. If you use any custom controls they must be installed/registered on the users machine.  According to my information Microsoft will support Windows 8.1 up through January 10, 2023. I fully expect Microsoft to support the applications on the next version of Windows there is just to much software that is in use based on this platform. The sad reality is a lot of companies don't want to upgrade unless they are forced to.

[Cho Sing Kum]

The files that are required for VB6 written apps to run are:

msvbvm60.dll
comcat.dll
asycfilt.dll
oleaut32.dll
olepro32.dll
stdole2.tlb
mfc42.dll
msvcrt.dll

Except for  msvbvm60.dll, the rest are Windows system files. All these files  are pre-installed in x86 and x64 Windows since Vista.

Ever since I found non-OCX replacement of the whole bulk of Common Controls, I have returned to VB6 "with a vengeance". I have even embarked on writing new apps in VB6. It is confirmed I can copy-and-paste my VB6 written app and it runs everywhere without the need to install any of the OCX common controls that has become very clumsy in Windows 8.

The downside? Only Win 32-bit. And so long as Win 32-bit still survive there is no problem. That put it very far into the future...... until 128-bit OS with only 64-bit in WOW? Same situation with 16-bit living until 64-bit with 32 bit in WOW.

http://www.planetsquires.com/protect/forum/index.php?topic=3502.msg25671#msg25671

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?698563-CommonControls-(Replacement-of-the-MS-common-controls)

It is really copy-and-paste now.

[Paul Squires]

PB should have a powerful visual designer like VB. No excuse. I'm not saying that FireFly is that IDE but be it Phoenix or whatever, PBForms is just not even comparable to the incredible VB environment. Not even close.

[Cho Sing Kum]

I did some research on the web to make VB6 "portable" and was successful to make VB6 run in Win8 x64 without having to go through the headache of installing. I copied and paste my VB6 folder onto a thumb drive, insert into the Win8 x64 notebook and run. Initially 3 errors:

1) Have to copy dao35.dll from my Win7 Common Files folder and I think I may have to register it or don't need to by putting it in the VB6 folder, cannot remember.
2) Fix the VB6tmpl.tlb error by renaming a file:
http://support.microsoft.com/KB/262976
3) Fix another error similar to (2) but cannot remember which file.  Search on the web for the error message was all it took.

But one more step. At this point the IDE cannot build the project exe. So I found the registry entry to make this work:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Licenses\74872840-703A-11d1-A3AF-00A0C90F26FA]
@="mninuglgknogtgjnthmnggjgsmrmgniglish"

After these simple steps, I can run the VB6 IDE and build project exe. Well so long as I do not need those OCXes and I don't need them anymore.

Now it gives me more time to learn another language, I will take up Xcode/Objective-C on the mac and then later see how I can use Objective-C in Windows. I know there are some tools (eg CocoTron) but like all open-source tools they never really will take off. The most important is I have time now to plan ahead.

[Knuth Konrad]

Nice! Thanks for sharing. Although I currently have no issues with installing VB6 on my machines, this might come in useful at some time.

[Haakon Birkeland]

Why odd? I still use VB6 on a daily basis.

I still use XP on a daily basis, but it’s not making my days any better. On the contrary it keep raising issues with applications moving on, that I can’t upgrade to for the new and desirable features. Like for instance LightRoom that stopped working on XP at version 4.

Odd because after all thse years of growing into retirement I just didn't / don't see it being revitalized and getting young and fresh again.

There are also some interesting projects going on to enhance/keep alive VB6, such as …

Then there is the inevitable wait for better times. I’m gonna die waiting for improvements to old and new things, while that keeps me somewhat unproductive.

It amazes me how many custom controls are still being produced for the language.

Probably just a bonus from the fact that VB uses ActiveX controls and those are still popular in other environments.

I thought VB6 required a runtime?

If I don’t recall wrongly I tried something years ago that where supposed to package every (used) runtime and control in a self registering package that required no installation. Don’t think it ever worked as expected, cause I’d probably have used it a lot then.

He said - he personally feels that one of the biggest mistakes MS made was dropping VB6.

I second that. I more or less dropped Visual Basic completely when .Net was released, announcing the slow death of VB6.

I did some research on the web to make VB6 "portable" …

There is a portable version floating out in the gray zone of the web. Tried it last year but it was crashing a lot.