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Any tips or caveats for using VS6 to develop modern software?

by prvc 4y ago

cudgy 4y ago
What is “modern software”?
badsectoracula 4y ago
Installing VS6 on modern Win10 can be annoying. Might actually be easier to make a dedicated Wine prefix on Linux :-P. Anyway, there is an article written on CodeProject[0] a few years ago about installing VS6. It may also work on Win11, however due to the changes over time you need to do some more additional stuff: 1. Do not install the OLE/COM viewer 2. Ensure the installation finished propertly otherwise SP6 wont install 4. Install SP2 CD if you have it (it was part of my own VS6 box) 5. If setupsp6.exe wont run, copy sp698ent.stf to acmsetup.stf and run acmsetup.exe instad 6. Install tlloc fix from [1], otherwise the debugger wont be able to terminate finished applications After all that Visual C++ 6 should work fine. For VB6 you may want to run it in Win9x compatibility mode, otherwise you'd get some slow drawing in the form editor. But something like Lazarus[2] would be better if you want to throw together some GUI app, it isn't like there is any special integration between VC6 and VB6 (something that i always found weird - ideally VB6 should have been able to use VC6 headers or even C sources directly just by making them part of the project, kinda like how you could mix Delphi and C++ in later versions of Delphi and C++ Builder, but for some reason Microsoft treated VS6 and VB6 as if they were each being made by a different company and only coincidentally happened to be on the same CD). Though honestly if you have enough RAM, VS6 isn't really that much faster compared to modern Visual Studio. From that time period something like C++ Builder 1 is way faster. [0] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1191047/Install-Visual-Studio-on-Windows https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1191047/Install-Visual-... [1] https://github.com/pinchyCZN/VC6x64Fix https://github.com/pinchyCZN/VC6x64Fix [2] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- laumars 4y ago
  > ideally VB6 should have been able to use VC6 headers or even C sources directly just by making them part of the project You could access compiled DLLs from C and C++ projects within Visual Basic. Not quite the same thing as headers I know but it did at least fill that gap that you described.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    You could do that from pretty much any Windows language, Visual Basic wasn't special in that regard and my point was that since both were MS products and part of the same package they could have much better integration.
    - laumars 4y ago
      > You could do that from pretty much any Windows language, Visual Basic wasn't special in that regard You mean “Microsoft” language surely? You couldn’t access DLLs from Perl, PHP, Java, and a bunch other other languages that had been ported to Windows. And my point wasn’t that VB was special. Just that you could still interface with C++ code albeit only via compiled libraries (you also could access COM objects too). > my point was that since both were MS products and part of the same package they could have much better integration. I got that was your point but they weren’t part of the same package. VB didn’t ship with a C++ compiler and nor did Visual Studio support compiling Visual Basic. They were sold as separate products and their IDEs were rather different too. Don’t be fooled into thinking that because they share a similar product name (I mean that makes sense from a marketing perspective) that they were the same package. Having used both, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the similarities were only skin deep.
      - badsectoracula 4y ago
        > You mean “Microsoft” language surely? You couldn’t access DLLs from Perl, PHP, Java, and a bunch other other languages that had been ported to Windows. There were languages that weren't able to call such DLLs, but there were also many that could that weren't made by Microsoft - e.g. Borland Delphi, Power BASIC, a bunch of Smalltalk implementations, etc. > I got that was your point but they weren’t part of the same package. VB didn’t ship with a C++ compiler and nor did Visual Studio support compiling Visual Basic. They were sold as separate products and their IDEs were rather different too. I know what they were, what i referred to was what they should have been considering that they were (potentially) part of the same package (Visual Studio as a product, not the IDE that hosted Visual C++, though honestly that shouldn't really matter) and made by the same company who had access to the source code, libraries, etc to make these two programs "know" about each other in a more integrated way than what external 3rd party development tools were able to do. This was about a what could have been, not about what it was (nor about why it was like that either - chances are they were made by largely different teams that competed with each other and only had to deal with their programs "living" in the same CD :-P).

Any tips or caveats for using VS6 to develop modern software?

by prvc 4y ago

Any tips or caveats for using VS6 to develop modern software?

cudgy 4y ago

What is “modern software”?

badsectoracula 4y ago

Installing VS6 on modern Win10 can be annoying. Might actually be easier to make a dedicated Wine prefix on Linux :-P. Anyway, there is an article written on CodeProject[0] a few years ago about installing VS6. It may also work on Win11, however due to the changes over time you need to do some more additional stuff: 1. Do not install the OLE/COM viewer 2. Ensure the installation finished propertly otherwise SP6 wont install 4. Install SP2 CD if you have it (it was part of my own VS6 box) 5. If setupsp6.exe wont run, copy sp698ent.stf to acmsetup.stf and run acmsetup.exe instad 6. Install tlloc fix from [1], otherwise the debugger wont be able to terminate finished applications After all that Visual C++ 6 should work fine. For VB6 you may want to run it in Win9x compatibility mode, otherwise you'd get some slow drawing in the form editor. But something like Lazarus[2] would be better if you want to throw together some GUI app, it isn't like there is any special integration between VC6 and VB6 (something that i always found weird - ideally VB6 should have been able to use VC6 headers or even C sources directly just by making them part of the project, kinda like how you could mix Delphi and C++ in later versions of Delphi and C++ Builder, but for some reason Microsoft treated VS6 and VB6 as if they were each being made by a different company and only coincidentally happened to be on the same CD). Though honestly if you have enough RAM, VS6 isn't really that much faster compared to modern Visual Studio. From that time period something like C++ Builder 1 is way faster. [0] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1191047/Install-Visual-Studio-on-Windows https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1191047/Install-Visual-... [1] https://github.com/pinchyCZN/VC6x64Fix https://github.com/pinchyCZN/VC6x64Fix [2] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

laumars 4y ago
> ideally VB6 should have been able to use VC6 headers or even C sources directly just by making them part of the project You could access compiled DLLs from C and C++ projects within Visual Basic. Not quite the same thing as headers I know but it did at least fill that gap that you described.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  You could do that from pretty much any Windows language, Visual Basic wasn't special in that regard and my point was that since both were MS products and part of the same package they could have much better integration.
  - laumars 4y ago
    > You could do that from pretty much any Windows language, Visual Basic wasn't special in that regard You mean “Microsoft” language surely? You couldn’t access DLLs from Perl, PHP, Java, and a bunch other other languages that had been ported to Windows. And my point wasn’t that VB was special. Just that you could still interface with C++ code albeit only via compiled libraries (you also could access COM objects too). > my point was that since both were MS products and part of the same package they could have much better integration. I got that was your point but they weren’t part of the same package. VB didn’t ship with a C++ compiler and nor did Visual Studio support compiling Visual Basic. They were sold as separate products and their IDEs were rather different too. Don’t be fooled into thinking that because they share a similar product name (I mean that makes sense from a marketing perspective) that they were the same package. Having used both, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the similarities were only skin deep.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      > You mean “Microsoft” language surely? You couldn’t access DLLs from Perl, PHP, Java, and a bunch other other languages that had been ported to Windows. There were languages that weren't able to call such DLLs, but there were also many that could that weren't made by Microsoft - e.g. Borland Delphi, Power BASIC, a bunch of Smalltalk implementations, etc. > I got that was your point but they weren’t part of the same package. VB didn’t ship with a C++ compiler and nor did Visual Studio support compiling Visual Basic. They were sold as separate products and their IDEs were rather different too. I know what they were, what i referred to was what they should have been considering that they were (potentially) part of the same package (Visual Studio as a product, not the IDE that hosted Visual C++, though honestly that shouldn't really matter) and made by the same company who had access to the source code, libraries, etc to make these two programs "know" about each other in a more integrated way than what external 3rd party development tools were able to do. This was about a what could have been, not about what it was (nor about why it was like that either - chances are they were made by largely different teams that competed with each other and only had to deal with their programs "living" in the same CD :-P).