The Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 is a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .NET forms and controls in a Visual Basic 6 application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time. The goal is a phased upgrade, with production releases at the end of each iteration containing both Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET forms running in the same Visual Basic 6 process.
Most importantly, the Toolkit guides you down a migration path that allows you to focus on writing code that adds business value instead of infrastructure and interop code.
Bring the Power of .NET to Visual Basic 6
The Interop Forms Toolkit provides tools and components that simplify the process of building forms and controls with Visual Basic .NET that can be easily consumed from Visual Basic 6. All the required COM interop components can be created with the click of a button, allowing you to quickly create powerful hybrid applications. The Toolkit makes it easy to expose .NET form methods, properties, and events to Visual Basic 6. In addition, functionality is provided to share application state and signal application-level events.
New in Version 2.0 – Interop UserControls
Interop UserControls allow you to host any .NET control on a Visual Basic 6 form as if it was a real ActiveX control. This means you can extend your existing Visual Basic 6 applications by taking advantage of the rich library of controls that .NET has to offer.
In the image below, you can see a standard Visual Basic 6 form hosting a .NET ToolStrip and a MenuStrip. Creating these controls in Visual Basic 6 would be extremely time-consuming, but by using .NET these controls can be added in seconds!
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These controls can also be placed on MDI forms, which the previous version of the Toolkit did not support. Other new features include a redistributable package for easier deployment, RegFree COM support for Interop UserControls, and substantially improved documentation.
Interop Forms
Here we see a Visual Basic 6 Application (Orders) that launches a .NET form as a Customer lookup screen. The .NET form was quickly created using drag and drop from the Data Sources window, and can easily make calls to a Web service.
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Leverage Your Visual Basic 6 Investments
The toolkit allows you to preserve your Visual Basic 6 applications and add functionality to them through additional .NET forms. For example, you could provide more dynamic content by adding a WinForm that accesses Web services or RSS feeds. You could create lookup dialogs faster using .NET's Data Sources Window. ClickOnce Deployment allows you to deploy the entire application (both the Visual Basic 6 part and the .NET part).
Wrap Existing .NET Projects
Although the toolkit provides templates to get you started, you can also expose your existing .NET Forms to Visual Basic 6. Just load your forms into a Class Library, and click on "Generate InteropForm Wrapper Classes" and the tool will create the required COM wrappers.
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Fully Extensible
With an extensible architecture and Full Source Code Available, it's easy to customize the toolkit to your specific requirements.
- Interfaces: All of the core toolkit services have interfaces defined which you can use to create your own implementations
- Inheritance: All of the core toolkit services are inheritable and the behavior is overridable
- Partial Classes: The add-in generated code can be extended via partial classes