Visual Basic 2008 versus Visual Basic 6

I just have experience with Visual Basic.NET 2003, 2005 and 2008. I don't have any experience with Visual Basic 6 and before. I've experienced a lot of slowness in running a lot of the graphics screens in an application I've been working on for more than 2 years now. I moved to a new computer and it runs some screens quite a bit faster but I could swear that my old AMD processor computer from 2005 was running some of the screens faster than my new computer which is an Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB on Vista and XP(dual boot set up).

I remember hearing that Visual Basic 6 runs fast. Can you create a Visual Basic 6 application that can be released for Vista or XP? I thought that the answer to this is no but I see there are a lot of people still working with Visual Basic 6. I plan on finishing the Visual Basic 2008 project I'm working on which is a personal project of my own and releasing it to run on the currently used operating systems but I've been considering moving to another language that is perhaps more cpu efficient.

There are problems I know in the GDI of Visual Studio. I discovered one that I reported to Microsoft Connect last summer. They acknowledged the problem and said they would do something about it. They haven't yet and in fact were very slow to finally tell me that they were handing the problem off to some other team but they didn't tell me exactly which one.

Anyway I was wondering if you're doing graphics programming and you want speed and efficiency are there some promising alternatives to Visual Basic 2008 that will work with todays operating systems? I've seen some screen saver programs that were written back in the 90s that work so smoothly and I'm thinking here we are in 2009 with all this extra processing power and yet a lot of the programs seem to run slower than some of the stuff that was written in the 90s.

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Originally Posted by EntityX

Can you create a Visual Basic 6 application that can be released for Vista or XP?

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The answer is yes you can! :) Although some creations may not work in Vista because of support issues. Such problems include plug-ins not working in VB6 under Vista and the help files .chm (I think) don't work either.

Take Koolsid's Code Generator for example:

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...02#post3448802

It works fine in VB6 on an WinXP machine but fails to show in VB6 on a Vista machine.

chm works. It's the old help files that aren't supported any more, although you can now download from windows live the old help displayer program.

the biggest issue with vb6 in vista is you have to make sure if you write any files to disk they are written where they are allowed to be written or someone's user settings may stop it from working.

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

chm works. It's the old help files that aren't supported any more, although you can now download from windows live the old help displayer program.

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Just checked the link again and it mentions that it's the Windows Help Format files that won't run in Vista unless you download the viewer.

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Originally Posted by Lord Orwell

the biggest issue with vb6 in vista is you have to make sure if you write any files to disk they are written where they are allowed to be written or someone's user settings may stop it from working.

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That also applies to XP and 2000 - just that most home users logged in with admin rights, so didn't notice.

The Windows 2000 Developer Guidelines (which came with my copy of VB6 in 1998, and have been available on the web ever since) specifies which folders should be used for storing data (not within Program Files, but in AppData etc) and which parts of the Registry are valid, etc.

I intentionally used a login with reduced rights on XP (among other reasons, to limit the potential damage of viruses), and found several programs which failed in the same way as they would for Vista.

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Originally Posted by Nightwalker83

Just checked the link again and it mentions that it's the Windows Help Format files that won't run in Vista unless you download the viewer.

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that's what i said. CHM is displayed by internet explorer's engine. Stands for Compiled HTML