Microsoft this week began offering a toolkit to help move Visual Basic 6 applications to .Net. The issue of accommodating the earlier Visual Basic 6 technology in the new .Net paradigm has been an ongoing one for Microsoft. The Interop Forms Toolkit moves applications form by form to .Net, said Rob Caron, Microsoft content architect for Visual Studio Team System, in his blog. “Are you maintaining an application built in Visual Basic 6, but itch to start doing some .Net development? Now you can live in both worlds. Instead of a one-time migration effort or complete rewrite, you can use the Interop Forms Toolkit to move your application form by form to .Net,” Caron said. The toolkit, downloadable here, simplifies the process of displaying .Net WinForms in a Visual Basic 6 application. The Interop Forms Toolkit provides tools and components to simplify the process of building forms with Visual Basic .Net that can be consumed from Visual Basic 6, according to an MSDN Web page dedicated to the toolkit. Required COM interop components can be created with the click of a button for building applications. The toolkit makes it easy to expose .Net form methods, properties, and events to Visual Basic 6. In addition, functionality is provided to share application state and signal application-level events, the company said. The toolkit gives developers a migration path enabling developers to focus on writing code for business value instead of infrastructure and interoperability, Microsoft said. Using the toolkit requires the .Net Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Basic 6. The 2003, XP and Vista versions of Windows are supported. Software Development