VB6 Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 Now Available

For those who are still supporting VB6 Applications, Microsoft has released the Interop Forms Toolkit, a free add-in for Visual Studio that allows you to easily combine VB6 with .Net.  Since Windows Vista comes pre-installed with .Net 3.0 you can use this to take advantage of many new .Net features directly from VB.

The Interop Forms Toolkit provides tools and components that simplify the process of building forms with Visual Basic .NET that can be easily consumed from Visual Basic 6. All the required COM interop components can be created with the click of a button, allowing you to quickly create powerful 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 toolkit allows you to preserve your Visual Basic 6 applications and add functionality to them through additional .NET forms. For example, you could provide more dynamic content by adding a WinForm that accesses Web services or RSS feeds. You could create lookup dialogs faster using .NET's Data Sources Window. ClickOnce Deployment allows you to deploy the entire application (both the Visual Basic 6 part and the .NET part).

Although the toolkit provides templates to get you started, you can also expose your existing .NET Forms to Visual Basic 6. Just load your forms into a Class Library, and click on "Generate InteropForm Wrapper Classes" and the tool will create the required COM wrappers.

With an extensible architecture and Full Source Code Available, it's easy to customize the toolkit to your specific requirements.

Interfaces: All of the core toolkit services have interfaces defined which you can use to create your own implementations
Inheritance: All of the core toolkit services are inheritable and the behavior is overridable
Partial Classes: The add-in generated code can be extended via partial classes