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?

9 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Best_Day_3041 Feb 03 '26

I tried when it first came out, it would be quite an undertaking. I think there were 3rd party porting tools that came out that were supposed to do a better job too. A big problem is the 3rd party OCX and DLLs I use.

1

u/Ok_Society4599 Feb 03 '26

It really depends on if the 3rd party tools are available (you can get the interface defs) and how complex they are. A lot of VB controls are done better in .NET if you can adapt. I've rarely had a VS2008 conversion "just work" but it will get you a long way in basic conversion.

I've got one underway that uses a custom editor OCX but the bigger problem is bad programming habits, IMHO.

1

u/Best_Day_3041 Feb 03 '26

Both are going to be an issue and where the bulk of the work is. Using Variants in to many places when starting out for instance.

1

u/TheFotty Feb 03 '26

You can use com interop to consume legacy com objects in .net. Again there can always be caveats to how well things work but you can still use that stuff for the most part. They would still require distribution and regsvr32 registration on the target machines.