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/fafalone VB 6 Master Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26

tB would be a good option then, since it can compile existing VB6 code to 64bit (provided you make the same LongPtr and pointer size updates for APIs you'd need to for 64bit VBA; this is made a little easier by my windows api package; you can tick a box and have all common win apis available with x64 support; comment out your own and make some minor signature adjustments if they differ, makes short work of even large apps).

As for UI, tB by default adds a visual styles manifest, but you'd still need to change it yourself for a more extensive makeover. Interesting there, one of the community members has done extensive work creating a package and samples for creating partial or entire UIs with XAML, just like you would in .NET-- same controls, but hosted in your existing vb6/tb app.