hello - and thank you for your time. First a little back-ground.
We have a legacy system that is written in VB6 and uses the VBScript very extensively as a way of extending this system (500,000 plus lines of code). We are slowing planning a migration to VB.NET but have found many issues where the VBScript code cant be backward compatible with the new .NET classes.
One option would be to implement a new system in the existing VB6 application to be able to convert VBScript to VB.NET. The way this would work is that we would go to the VB6 application and one of the VBScript modules and upgrade this one VBScript Module to VB.NET. The code changes are not extensive for this change. This would be like an integrated development environment and within VB6 and it would store the compiled .NET class and use interop to access the .NET object much in the same way as it currently access VBScript. This would be great as the new .NET codebase for the upgraded VB6 core application would be fully backward compatible with the re-written converted vb.NET class and during the transition phase it would also provide a performance boost to the old VB6 application.
QUESTION:
If I was to proceed with this development, what is the best way to develop this VB.NET code within the VB6 environment?? I know how to compile and create the code - but my question relates to the best to way to get my people to write the VB.NET code.
In it's simplest form it could a text editor to write the VB.NET code.
But I was thinking that a custom project type in VS2010 might be better. From VB6 you would click a button that would open a VB.NET project - edit it, make changes and when done upload it back into the VB6 application?? Might even be able to debug from this location??
Can anyone offer any advice as to this type of project, where to start and if this sounds practical??
Thanks very much for your help
matvdl