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Upgrading Applications Created in Previous Versions of Visual Basic

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With Visual Basic 2008, you can upgrade applications created in Visual Basic 6.0 so that you can continue development, taking advantage of the benefits of the .NET Framework. When you first open a Visual Basic 6.0 project file (.vbp), the Upgrade Wizard appears. You can also upgrade projects outside the development environment with the provided command-line tool.

The upgrading tools modify code in your project to comply with Visual Basic 2008 syntax and replace any forms and controls with Visual Basic 2008 equivalents. Because of the differences between Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Basic 2008, some parts of your project may not upgrade correctly. In these cases, you receive an upgrade report to guide you through the process of modifying the application.

Note

If you are not ready to upgrade your Visual Basic 6.0 application, you can still take advantage of the benefits of .NET Framework by using Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0. Interop Forms Toolkit enables you to create new forms or User Controls in Visual Basic 2008 and use them in your Visual Basic 6.0 application.

Interop Toolkit 2.0 can be downloaded for free from the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 page on the MSDN Web site.

Some Visual Basic 6.0 applications may not benefit from being upgraded to Visual Basic 2008. You can prepare those applications that you do choose to upgrade so that upgrading occurs with little difficulty.

The following topics will help you better understand the upgrade process.

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