Converting from Visual Basic 6 to REALbasic is no trivial matter. When Real Software offered the Visual Basic Project Converter (VBPC) I lobbied long and hard to get it removed from their website because it gave a really bad first impression of REALbasic. In many respects, it made the conversion process worse because it tried to, and failed miserably, to convert code that couldn’t be converted. To their credit, Real Software pulled the free application and went back to the drawing board. Now they’ve come back with a new product called the Visual Basic Migration Assistant (VBMA). Did they get it right this time?
To test VBMA out, I found a simple calculator control on Planet Source Code (www.planet-source-code.com) to convert to REALbasic. The project URL is http://www.Planet-Source-Code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=32575&lngWId=1 and you can download it if you want and follow along. I’m doing this using the Mac OS X version so your results may be slightly different.
When first opening VBMA you are presented with a simple window. Its minimal design is somewhat confusing but given that you’ve just started the VB Migration Assistant you should probably know that you’re here to try to migrate your VB6 project to REALbasic. Clicking on the Import Project button allows you to select your visual basic project. You may also attempt to convert individual items by using the Add Item button. You may also choose which VB project encoding to use from a simple popup menu in the lower right portion of the window. Clicking the Next button takes you to the control mapping panel.
The control mapping panel is pretty important if your project uses non-standard controls. This is your chance to choose the REALbasic control to use. For example, if your VB6 project uses a TreeView control you could choose to use the RB listbox or, if you use the Einhugur TreeView control you could easily create your own control map to convert use it by creating and modifying the control map.
One oversight in VBMA that needs to be rectified in the next release is that the ControlMap file has no file extension nor does it have a type or creator code so in both Macintosh OS X and in Windows the OS doesn’t know what type of file it is. In reality, it’s a simple text file and may be opened and edited with any text editor.
There are two checkboxes on this panel that are important. The first is a checkbox to change all control fonts to System. The second checkbox is change the font size to zero. I really recommend that you check both option
s. Click the migrate button, name and choose a location for the project and VBMA will create a REALbasic project and open REALbasic for you.
Looking at the RB project it created a new App object, a menubar and a window named frmCalcu. Opening the window shows us that it did a pretty reasonable job of converting from the VB6 form to an RB window. In retrospect I might have changed the mapping from the buttons to bevel buttons but that’s debatable and you can play with this later.
Opening the code editor you’ll find some interesting results. VBMA doesn’t try to convert any code for you at all. What it does is copy all of the VB6 code into a Notes named after the VB6 object. It also attempts to copy code into the proper RB control events. For example, in VB6 we have the event code cmdDot_Click() and VBMA correctly places the code in the cmdDot.Action event. In this simple project VBMA got everything correct. Simply running the project at this point creates no errors and our window opens but none of the controls do anything.
Some would argue that Real Software cheated with just copying the code over. I disagree because even though Visual Basic and REALbasic have ‘basic’ in the name they are not the same language. Unless you’re going to write a VB6 compiler I don’t think there’s any easy way to convert the language with 100% accuracy so why try? I think this balances the need to convert the form layouts quickly and getting the VB6 code into the RB project.
Converting the forms, honestly, is the easy part. The hard part will be converting the code by hand. We’ll start in the number buttons named Numero. VBMA conveniently adds some comments at the top of the function that shows what the parameters are and if there is a return variable. In this case, the Numero.Action passes in the control array index number and doesn’t return anything. What this method does is read the number and then puts the new number into the display editfield.
If we uncomment all of the code in the project and try to run the project we get a Type Mismatch error on the InStr line because RB expects a boolean value in the IF statement and InStr returns a number. Simply changing the line to If InStr(txtDisplay.Text, “.”) > 0 Then let’s the project compile and work allowing you to click on any of the numbers.
Then we continue on to the other buttons testing each one. The cmdDot button is similar to the Numero. Once we get to the cmdCancel we get to an On Error Resume Next error in VB6. There is no exact equivalent in RB so this is where some human intervention is necessary. In this case I’m not sure why they added this error handling in. It’s entirely possible that the Mid function in VB6 creates an error if the 3rd parameter is negative. Regardless, it’s a good example of trying to figure out what the original VB6 code was trying to do and then having to figure out the RB equivalent.
Other issues that commonly occur when converting to REALbasic is that VB6 is a very loosely typed language. This means that you can assign a number to text field and it will happily convert it to a string for you and this is bad. If you try to concatenate the string “12″ + “12″ in VB6 you’ll get “24″ as the result. Not surprisingly there is a work around in VB6 with the & symbol. Using “12″ & “12″ results in the string “1212″. So when you get to the cmdEqual.Actio
n event you’ll see this code txtDisplay.Text = answer which is valid in VB6 but not in RB because answer is a double and the RB compiler rightly complains about it. In RB you would change this to txtDisplay.text = cstr(answer). Alternatively you might want to use the Format function to make the display text better.
A lot of code will convert cleanly. However, code that will almost always require additional attention are recordsets. REALbasic’s recordset doesn’t have an AddNew function like Visual Basic. Nearly anything to do with file I/O is going to be a hassle because VB’s file commands are pretty archaic in comparison to REALbasic’s folderitem class.
The other item of note in our very simple project is that the cmdEqual_KeyPress method should really be the window KeyDown event. Moving it there and handling the keypress let’s the app work via the keyboard. Instead of calling the VB click event function we have to convert to the pushbutton push method instead.
This is an incredibly simple project and probably took me more time to ‘convert’ it then starting from scratch, however it gives us some ideas on how the process works. So let’s take a look at a more complex project. I took an old VB6 project of my own and ran it through VBMA to see what it would do.
This project is an old MDI-type application, uses Crystal Reports and a few miscellaneous libraries. The first thing to note is that the Crystal Reports Viewer, zip controls, and the MDI form will get converted to a REALbasic canvas object. It’s not ideal but I could certainly modify the Control Map to do a little better job.
Another few oddities in the mapping is that the VB6 Common Dialog and toolbar get converted to canvas objects as well. The REALbasic options don’t include toolbars so I’m assuming that it’s not possible to convert a VB6 toolbar to a REALbasic toolbar. The common dialog is a bit tricky because there is not RB equivalent so I’m not sure if it’s better to convert it or to come up with a helper object to make it easier to deal with later. Again, with the Control Map you could do this on your own if you convert projects with any regularity.
In my large project VBMA had issues with converting deeply nested controls (ie. a control inside a groupbox inside another groupbox on a tab). If your VB6 project is doing a lot of this then you might have some issues (the controls are all there, just layered oddly). Other than that it does a decent job of converting a project.
Things that I’d like to see added in future versions: The ability to change colors to a default color and the ability to set a default height for controls.
VBMA is not perfect but I like it. It doesn’t try to do everything for me and in the long run converting your BASIC code manually is the easy part since the really time consuming part of migrating to REALbasic is converting the forms to RB windows. VBMA lets you do this quickly and easily.
If VBMA is a bit too ‘lite’ for you, you can always try VB Convert! from AYB Computers. It has many more options for form and code conversion. It has some quirks in code conversion but it might be a good alternative for you. VB Convert! Pro costs $65.
