Dropping portions of VB6 code during the migration to VB.NET

Origin:http://www.dotnet2themax.com/blogs/fbalena/PermaLink,guid,bedf049b-f082-4c71-b507-f4c81f4a6e46.aspx

 

I am working at the migration of a large VB6 project and at one point I needed to drop a few methods in the VB6 app, in such a way that the methods would be "invisible" to VB.NET. This action was necessary because these methods performed similarly to a .NET native method. Obviously, I had the option to manually delete the methods after the migration, but if their number is high and if you need to run the wizard more than once on the same VB6 app (as it happens frequently, in the process of preparing the app for the migration), then deleing these portions of code each time becomes a nuisance.

Apparently, you can't instruct the migration wizard to ignore one or more pieces of code. Nevertheless, the solution is quite simple: you just need to bracket these pieces of code - entire methods or just individual statements - in a #If Win32 ...#End If block. The Win32 compilation constant - that is probably ignored by most VB developers today - was introduced when Visual Basic 4 was released, and was recognized also by VB5 and VB6 (but not by any version of VB.NET). Visual Basic 4 is the only version of this language that is available in 16-bit and 32-bit edition, and this compilation constant (together with Win16) allowed to define blocks of code that were compiled under only one of those versions, while allowing to mantain a single source code for both. Therefore, the following VB6 code:

#If WIN32 Then
   Private Sub Do Something(ByVal n As Integer)   
      ' ...
   End Sub
#End If

is correctly migrated to VB.NET by the migration wizard as follows:

#If WIN32 Then
   Private Sub DoSomething(ByVal n As Short)
      ' ...
   End Sub
#End If

but this piece of code will be skipped over by the VB.NET compiler because the Win32 constant isn't defined under VB.NET.

This "feature" can actually create a problem if you are migrating a VB6 app that has been evolved from an older application that was originally written in VB4. In this case, in fact, it is possible that its source code contains one or more #If Win32 blocks. In most cases you *want* to migrate this code, but these portions will be ignored after the migration to VB.NET. If this is the case, you should then locate all the the occurrences of #If Win32 statements in the code and delete them before the migration.