VB6 to VB.NET & Strong Naming

[rob]

Dear All,

We have a fairly big application that has to be converted from VB6 to
VB.NET. The goal is to convert one component after the other and do some
testing after each step. In a first approach one VB6 (ActiveX DLL) project
was converted to VB.NET utilizing the automatic conversion of VS.NET.
Besides the new dll other interop dlls have been created, i.e.
Interop.ASPTypeLibrary.dll, etc. While the actuall dll is strongly named all
the other generated interops are not strongly named and therefore cannot be
put in the GAC. It seems the only way to get it to work is by removing the
references and then adding them back in. This is extremly tedious as there
are many interops and MANY projects that have to be converted. Is there a
better way to do this?

Once that sub-project is converted to VB.NET the other components have to be
able to access it. In order to access a .NET assembly from a COM another
interface has to be created. I did use regasm but then did get stuck on what
to do further. Can anybody give me some general input on a good way to
convert a big VB6 app to a VB.NET app? Links and comments are highly
appreciated.

Rob

[Bonj]

You can vastly reduce the amount that need to be converted by carefully selecting only the ones that are going to need to be modified for conversion. If there's a COM DLL that's written in VB6 and it isn't going to need to be changed, why convert it to VB6? There's no point, you don't gain anything. If you did your initial design of the VB6 project well, then there should be quite a lot of DLL-based functionality that falls into this category - if not, you haven't applied the principle of localization and encapsulation well enough when doing your VB6 work in the first place
If there's stuff that's not going to need changing but may need adding to, consider wrapping VB6 COM DLLs in new, .NET library DLLs.