Gkaruk's Technological Blog

Micrsoft last week made available the Avalon "WinFX" CTP (Community Technology Preview) for public release. A lot of users out their who are not developers will have never heard of WinFx (codename Avalon), so what is it.

"Avalon" is the code name for Microsoft's unified presentation subsystem or Graphical User Interface for Windows. "Avalon" unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interface. This enables developers and designers to create visually-stunning, differentiated user experiences that improve customer connection.

For more on Avalon head over to LongHornBlog.com and also go grab yourself a copy of Avalon at Microsoft download site.

Whilst browsing for the syntax for the old VB6 RegTlib.exe tool I came across this site which has a large anount of useful .Net and some older Visual Basic 6 tools.

Some of the examples are:

• .Net FormatString Designer
  
• XML Serializer Pre Compiler
  
• .NET XML Checker and Validator

Take a look and I am sure you'll find as many of them as useful as I have.

I recently had to convert a VB6 Open-Source project to C#. Sadly Visual C# Express 2005 was not upto the migration job using the standard in built wizard.

My saviour was a Free application found on a german site. The application lets you convert VB6 code (*.bas, *.frm and *.cls) or Delphi code to *.cs files.

It works increibly well for getting you code converted, my only wish is that I could have point it to the *.vbp file and it didi the whole project. However for a Free app that saved me alot of time, it awesome!

Check BabbelFisken out at LARS Johansson's site.

[UPDATE]
I have also found and tried two commercial applications which allow the usage of the VB project file (.vbp) and then migrates all code within the project to a new c# project.

New applications found were:

• TransKing from e-IceBlue, which has FREE trial for 30 days (limited to 600 lines per file)
• VB-to-CS from NetCool, which has a FREE trial for 30 days (limited to 500 lines per file)