Visual Basic 6 Meets Windows Forms

A new add-on to Visual Studio (VS) 2005 helps developers take forms created with C# or Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) and make them accessible from Visual Basic (VB) 6. In principle, the Interop Forms Toolkit could make it easier for developers to migrate VB 6 applications to .NET incrementally by replacing individual forms with newer versions based on the .NET Framework. However, the process is far from seamless: developers must write custom code in both the .NET form and the VB 6 application and debugging is complex.

Supporting Hybrid Applications

The goal of the Interop Forms Toolkit is to allow developers to move a VB 6 application to .NET incrementally by replacing individual forms (the term used in VB to describe an interface window) in the application with new versions written using the .NET Framework. The idea is that rather than rewriting an application from scratch, a developer could migrate it piece by piece. The newer pieces could take advantage of some of the .NET Framework features, such as improved layout for forms and support for Web services.