I would love to see the VB6 language added to #Dev. MS will not do it to Visual Studio so the only other place I can think of going would be here. There are some commercial alternatives to VB6 based on BASIC but they are lacking in many, many areas.
Requirements
- Load VB6 project\group\bas\cls\etc.. files
- Offer the same compile options as the current VB6 IDE
- - Possibly extend these compile options to generate native x86 code
- Compile to the PCode or "Native" VB6 run-time code
- Use the great IDE features (refactor, winforms editor, etc...) currently in #Dev
- Support adding toolbox COM controls
- [I assume harder to do, thus low pri] Read existing ADD-INs from VB6 into #Dev
To make this effort easier, I would require (I would assume reengineering the whole VB6 language from scratch is a huge undertaking) that the original VB6 IDE be installed on the machine so that #Dev can leverage all command line utilities it uses for compiling.
What benefit could this bring to #Dev?
If you could do this, (currently any .NET work I do is in VS as I get free copies) you would be doing a HUGE service for the VB6 community. Not only that, if they all had replacement (I still keep a few VB6 projects active) for the IDE that was better then the legacy IDE, they would all migrate over to #Dev. This also would increase the possibility of them using #Dev for other .NET based projects since they have it all in one single IDE. This would increase your user base.
What benefit to VB6 users would this bring?
Well we would all get a maintained feature rich IDE. A single location to work on both VB6 and .NET based projects. And the possibility of having a VB6++ language eventually that added more OOP features and direct memory management to the normal VB6 language while retaining support for VB6- language.
Thanks for the time, I appreciate it!
-Steve De George JR
Note:
You could be adding 10,000 or more users to your user base: http://classicvb.org/petition/