Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard

Visual Basic 2008 enables a fundamental shift from traditional Windows development to building next-generation Web and n-tier applications. For this reason, your code will need to be upgraded to take advantage of Visual Basic 2008.

Process of Upgrading

The upgrade process happens automatically when you open a Visual Basic 6.0 project in Visual Basic 2008: the Upgrade Wizard steps you through the upgrade process and creates a new Visual Basic 2008 project (your existing project is left unchanged). This is a one-way process; the new Visual Basic 2008 project cannot be opened in Visual Basic 6.0.

When your project is upgraded, the language is modified for any syntax changes and your Visual Basic 6.0 forms are converted to Windows Forms. In most cases, you will have to make some changes to your code after it is upgraded. This is required because certain objects and language features either have no equivalent in Visual Basic 2008 or have an equivalent too dissimilar for an automatic upgrade. After the upgrade, you may also want to change your application to take advantage of some of the new features in Visual Basic 2008.

To help you make the changes, after your project is upgraded, Visual Basic 2008 adds an upgrade report to your project itemizing any problems. It also inserts comments into your upgraded code alerting you to statements that will need to be changed. Because these comments are displayed as 'TO DO' tasks in the new Task List window, you can easily see what changes are required and navigate to the corresponding code statement simply by double-clicking the task. Each task and item in the upgrade report is associated with a Help topic giving further guidance as to why the code needs to be changed, and what you need to do.

See Also

Concepts

Completing the Upgrading Process

Why Upgrading Is Necessary

Preparing a Visual Basic 6.0 Application for Upgrading

Other Resources

Upgrading Applications Created in Previous Versions of Visual Basic