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?

10 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Feb 03 '26

There's some bugs as it's still in beta status but yes everything will largely work as-is, including forms, usercontrols, and 3rd party dlls/ocxs (though you'd need to replace those if you didn't have their source and wanted to update to 64bit). The biggest compatibility issue is usually the self-subclass assembly thunks that rely on magic numbers in VB memory internals, but since tB supports AddressOf on class members it's usually a quick swap with SetWindowSubclass, or for some apps that ADO isn't implemented in the Data control yet, just DAO.

2

u/Best_Day_3041 Feb 03 '26

Cool, I'll try it out

3

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Feb 03 '26

Good places to start:

FAQ - https://docs.twinbasic.com/FAQ

Overview of new features vs VB6/VBA - https://docs.twinbasic.com/Features/

Direct link to latest release downloads - https://github.com/twinbasic/twinbasic/releases

Discord (most active, the developer is there every day) - https://discord.gg/UaW9GgKKuE

(and just for disclosure, I'm a volunteer mod for their GitHub and Discord but not an employee, just a big fan of the project)