UTF8 text boxes

[Maverickz]

I maintain a user data management tool that is written in VB6. This is an application that is starting to be used worldwide and so needs to support multiple character sets using UTF8. I have asked a few dev collegues of mine and they all say it needs to be ported to .Net but I am not sure this really is an option due the where the program has to sit. So if anyone has some suggestions to try and get text boxes to support UTF8 characters it would be great.

Thanks,
The Mav

[dglienna]

Merri is very good with unicode. He has already made a few controls which utilize unicode. You can find a post with the controls here.
http://www.vbforums.com/showpost.php...74&postcount=4

[Maverickz]

I have looked at both of those. Unfortunatly the part of the code where he is actualy implementing UTF8 in the controls is precompiled so it cannot be viewed.

Thanks,
The Mav

[dglienna]

PM him. I'm sure that he'd be willing to help. He usually visits around 12 hours from now.

[Maverickz]

Thanks Dg I did go ahead and PM Merri. I will update this post with resolved if/when we can get a solution. In the meantime I guess I had better start working on porting the code and finding out if the .net framework can be installed on the machine that will be running it.

[Merri]

Only a short message here: there is a great Unicode information source on the web.

Tutorial: Using Unicode in Visual Basic 6

It is a good starting point and gives a lot of information. Unfortunatenaly there is no real Unicode textbox solution besides Forms 2.0 suggestion (and we all know it isn't redistributable).


Edit Btw, you can find somewhat fast Unicode conversion functions from my Goldpanda project. You need to pass the data as a byte array. You can change any codepage, UTF-8 or whatever to Unicode and vice versa.

[Maverickz]

Thanks Merri.

All of that is VERY informative. Thanks.

Unfortunatly at this point I think porting to VB.net or to a web based solution is going to be my only 2 real options. I may actualy port this to a .NET web service since that will allow me to add some additional security to the application that some paranoid higher ups have been asking for.

The Mav