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Overview Introduction The transition It's not there anymore? Bits and arrays Cannot just fix this one Property changes PDF Version

For quite some time now we have been hearing about Visual Studio .NET in general and Visual Basic .NET in particular. When the initial pre-release of .NET was given out at the 2000 PDC in Orlando, developers began getting a look at the vision that Microsoft had for our Windows future. A year later we've seen the changes that Microsoft is sending us in the .NET Framework and in Visual Basic .NET. And guess whatnot everybody is comfortable with the changes. Some in the developer community even say that VB.NET is not really Visual Basic at all, but an entirely new language.

While we wouldn't go that far, admittedly there are major changes in store for the Visual Basic programmer.

The good news is that Beta 2 of Visual Studio .NET has done a much better job at making our knowledge and experience in Visual Basic 6 portable to VB.NET. But questions still arise, so as a Visual Basic programmer, how do you intend to approach the upcoming move to VB.NET? In this paper, we will walk through some of the changes necessary to move existing projects to VB.NET and discuss how to write code now for an easier transition later.

The transition
Microsoft is trying to make this transition easier on existing projects. For instance, when you open a VB6 project in Visual Studio .NET IDE, a conversion utility upgrades the code to VB.NET. The Upgrade Wizard in Beta 2 is much improved over that in Beta 1. The new version does a good job at updating, by Microsoft estimates, 95 percent of your existing code. As we will discuss in this paper, there are still differences that you need to consider as you prepare to upgrade to VB.NET or write new code in VB.NET.

The Upgrade Wizard generates a report showing you where problems were encountered during the conversion from Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET.

There are some changes that you can program for now, in Visual Basic 6, and when you move to .NET they will work as you planned. For other items, there is nothing you can do in your Visual Basic 6 code to make the move to .NET easier. For these items you might find it useful to add a comment line next to your current code. The comment line can include the code as it would look in VB.NET or a note about how to make the upgrade later.