Can I use newer versions of Visual Studio for "old" things?

Question

I have several ATL / COM based DLLs that I use Visual C ++ 6.0 on. I need a few "old" things from the generated DLLs:

(1) They should be compatible with projects developed in Visual Basic 6.0 (old VB6, not VB.Net).

(2) They must be compatible with older operating systems - a minimum of Windows 98 SE. To be clear, I mean that they should work on such OSs, and not on the fact that I will need to develop them on a machine running such an OS.

I am tired of Visual Studio 6.0. Converting to Dot Net (or any other significant change like this) is out of the question at this time, so I must continue to use VB6. But can I switch to the new Visual Studio C ++ with minimal effort (i.e. a bit if some conversion is required)?

If so, are there any "gotchas" that I should follow?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Different versions of VS.Net can to some extent increase the old .Net projects, but not one of them can open anything pre-.Net, which includes 6.0 of any language.

You have to create a new C ++ project in one of the .Net VS applications and rebuild your C ++ project there, and it should work because unmanaged C ++ code does not require .Net runtime (and it still compiles its own machine code), but I haven’t done C ++ for a long time, so I don’t know for sure 100% that it will work.

Answer 2

Yes, but it is mildly painful. This is why most stores stick to VC6. I admit that I have not tested the COM DLLs in Windows 98, but still in NT 4.0 with Visual Studio 2005.

I would like to emphasize that there is no minimum effort. Depending on how your code is written, the conversion can be quite painful. In one project, the search and replacement of fixed 9 out of 10 problems. YMMV. You may need to rewrite part of the low-level sanitary ware COM.