Life after Visual Basic 6.0
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With the extended support for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 ending this year, many application developers are looking for guidance on whether to upgrade, reuse, or replace their legacy Visual Basic 6.0 code in favor of developing on software platforms supported by Microsoft.
To develop applications that take advantage of the latest .NET framework, you have three options:
- Upgrade – Convert your Visual Basic 6.0 code to Visual Basic .NET code. Choosing this option makes your applications more compatible with future versions of Visual Basic and gives you access to .NET features. This option does require rework.
- Reuse – Stay with Visual Basic 6.0 for existing applications that run critical tests and then call this code from new languages.
- Replace – Move to an environment specifically designed for test and measurement such as NI LabVIEW and NI LabWindows™/CVI or opt for another general-purpose language that supports .NET, such as C#.
If you choose to migrate to Visual Basic .NET, NI Measurement Studio provides the functionality you need to create applications in a .NET environment.
In addition to accessing the .NET framework, you now can add data acquisition functionality to your Web and Windows projects with the newly introduced NI-DAQmx driver and NI Measurement Studio software support for Visual Studio 2008.
Because the development environment is no longer tied to a specific version of the .NET framework, you can reduce deployment costs by adding functionality to your existing projects without having to upgrade to a new .NET framework on your deployed systems.
Download a white paper on effectively analyzing Visual Basic 6.0 applications for migration.
The mark LabWindows is used under a license from Microsoft Corporation. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.
This article first appeared in the Q2 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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