CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vb6
Rod
Rod

Reputation: 4471

Need to find out if some old third party controls with work with VB6 SP6

We have a legacy VB6 app, which is critical to our business. We're working on re-writing it in .NET, but that's going to take a long time.

Over the last few years, this old VB6 app has had problems with third party controls that we purchased about 10 years ago, when we wrote the VB6 app. These problems are getting progressively worse. For example, the application will suddenly crash. When it does I'll check the user's event log to see what happened, and almost all cases one of the third party controls failed, and took the application down with it. Sometimes this causes the user to lose data.

We've done the best we can to mitigate this and that's helped tremendously, but haven't been able to prevent all cases of these failures. A few years ago, when this problem first started to show itself, I did some investigation into why these crashes were occurring and I remember some people saying that some of these problems were due to the service pack we had our application at. Our VB6 app is currently at service pack 5. I learned that Microsoft had come out with service pack 6, for VB6, and asked about that, back then, and people advised me to not upgrade to SP6 for VB6 due to incompatibility issues with our third party controls, so we've left things alone.

However, now these crashes are occurring more frequently. It's occurred to us that perhaps the issue is some recent updates to Windows may have already moved VB6 to SP6. Or, perhaps the advice I was given years ago about leaving our application at SP5 for VB6 was wrong. In any case, we need to find out if we can move our application to SP6 for VB6, and thereby hopefully reduce, if not eliminate, the number of fatal crashes these old third party controls are giving us.

Here's the list of third party controls that our application is currently using. Does anyone know if these controls will work with VB6 SP6?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 810

Answers (3)

Cameron
Cameron

Reputation: 56

We have multiple VB6 apps using Sheridan Data Widgets 3.1, mainly the grid but the dropdown a bit these days too. Everything ran fine on Vista and 7 but once a few people upgraded to 10 (we ignored/avoided 8) problems emerged quickly.

Loading the grid started making the app crash, but it was strange. I could call the load function (it populated the grid) when initially displaying information, and it was fine. Other functions would change the data and reload the grid, and most worked except for one. Nothing special or different about it, but the grid took a special dislike to it. What was annoying was if I threw in a MsgBox every time before a line was added to the grid (we use AddItem mode) the silly thing didn't crash.

Had a similar problem once with the grids, found I had to divert focus to a new form that appears for less than a second. Might be something to do with how the grid draws? Or judging by the function that causes it to crash when no others do, perhaps certain sequences of events cause the crashes.

Looking at the event log on Win10 it's telling me the faulting module name is USER32.dll, exception code alternates between 0xc0000005 and 0xc000041d.

Upvotes: 0

Matt Wilko
Matt Wilko

Reputation: 27342

I can't give any advice about the Sheridan controls but we are using Crystal ActiveX Report Viewer and Runtime Library 10.0 with our VB6 app (using SP6) and this has no crashing issues.

Upvotes: 0

Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky

Reputation: 33667

I've used WSpell with VB6 SP6. Crystal was always pretty tightly in bed with Microsoft so I would expect that those work. Sheridan, well, I can't help you there.

That said... why ask? Just test it. You can always roll back if it doesn't work, right?

Upvotes: 2

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