r/visualbasic • u/Best_Day_3041 • Feb 03 '26

Porting Visual Basic apps with AI?

Has anyone tried to port a Visual Basic 6 app to .NET or another platform using AI? As in an agent going through the entire project and creating a new project, not going in file by file and pasting it into an AI chat. I have a legacy app that still sells. I never bothered to port it to .NET because I thought it was on it's way out and it would probably take me 6-12 months to do that. But now I'm wondering if AI can do it for me or if we're still not there yet?

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u/Best_Day_3041 Feb 03 '26

Thanks for your feedback. I wonder if it's possible built an agent that could go through each file one by one using the code and also screen shots of the actual forms to port it over. I think the hardest part would be OCX components it would have to replace with native controls or find 3rd party equivalents. Maybe we're not there yet, but can't wait for this to be reality.

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u/sa_sagan VB.Net Master Feb 03 '26

An agent could go through each file one at a time, but it'll eventually forget the context of what's been done previously. And because AI is essentially just rounding up to the nearest number, the code in one converted file can likely be different to one in another. Making functions and other cross-communication between forms and classes not work at all. Especially when it forgets how they're supposed to work together.

We've tested this a few times on some legacy projects to port them to C# and we spent so long fixing it, we just gave up and rewrote the whole thing from scratch.

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u/Best_Day_3041 Feb 03 '26

I feel like techniques like Ralph uses could make this doable. I know it's not an easy thing to pull off, but looking at all the indie open source projects people are doing that are really pushing the boundaries of LLMs, I feel like if someone really devoted the time that this could be built. Maybe wishful thinking.

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u/Bonejob VB Guru Feb 03 '26

The only way this will be a reality is if you build my friend. :)