Your Investment In Visual Basic™
Microsoft Visual Basic™ is arguably the most used development language on the planet. You’ve invested a lot of time and money in your Visual Basic 6 project and it does everything that you need it to do. But now you have to make a choice since Microsoft is no longer supporting and enhancing Visual Basic and is forcing everyone to the .NET platform. The introduction of Vista and Windows 7 might break your application due to new security concerns. Perhaps they make your application look dated.
Is your Visual Basic 6 project going to work in Windows 8? The answer is unknown, now, but it probably will. Microsoft customers have too many legacy applications to support for it to go away. The real question is how much work will it be get your apps, written in a 20 year old development environment, to run on a modern operating system. Check our our blog posts discussing Windows 8 and Visual Basic 6 here and here.
What are the Visual Basic Alternatives? Your options are limited if you don’t have a lot of time and money. You could switch to .NET and be stuck on the Windows platform for another decade. You could switch to Java or C++ and not leverage any of your existing work. You could switch to Apple’s Cocoa but then you leave out all your Windows users. Or, you could use Real Studio (formerly REALbasic) from Real Software.
Real Studio
Real Studio is one possible solution. Using one code base a good developer can easily create native executables for Windows, Macintosh and most Linux distributions. REALbasic is a modern object oriented language, that is highly extensible, and can connect to nearly any database.
Is Real Studio the Answer For You?
The answer is a definite, maybe. REALbasic and Visual Basic use the BASIC language and have ‘basic’ in their name but, in reality, have very little in common. Things such as file I/O and database access are wildly different between the two. It takes a skilled developer to accurately convert from Visual Basic to REALbasic. Don’t be fooled by free and inexpensive ‘converter’ applications-they don’t work! In some cases they can make the conversion process harder than it should be. Take a look at our blog article titled The State of Visual Basic 6 to REALbasic Conversion at BKeeney Brief’s blog.
BKeeney Software Inc.
BKeeney Software has multiple full-time developers with years of commercial application development experience using Visual Basic 6 and Real Studio. Our developers have spoken at multiple Real Studio conferences, written many tutorials and recorded over 30 hours of Real Studio training videos.
We made VB 6 Analyzer specifically to help make the process of getting an estimate for conversion as quick and painless as possible without having to send us your project. Now, you don’t have to worry about your intellectual property – we don’t see any of your source code just to get a quote.
Download Our VB6 Analyzer Tool Now! WIndows VBAnalyzer Exe Mac OS X VB6Analyzer.dmg
Follow the easy-to-use wizard to analyze your Visual Basic project and send us the report. Our skilled developers will review the Visual Basic 6 information and provide a preliminary estimate and timeframe.
What’s new in Version 1.0.5
- Updated controls for better OS compatibility
- Added an Export to RTF button in the Wizard
- Updated email compatibility
Once you click send, you should get a response from us within two business days. If you don’t, email us as it probably got caught in a spam filter somewhere!