This is truly a milestone in our release story. We have added many new features, including support for Visual Studio 2008 and for batch migratons. A number of KB articles describe how to use these new features, for example
[HOWTO] Generate Visual Studio 2008 project
We have added many new pragmas:
PreInclude and PostInclude pragmas allow you to include a piece of VB6 code (before the parsing step) or a piece of VB.NET code (after the migration is completed); they even support recursive inclusion (an include file can contain other PreInclude and PostInclude pragmas). The PreInclude pragma can be used in a *.pragmas file and in practice allows you to have all these *.pragmas file reference the same settings stored in a centralized file.
The OutputMode pragma now supports an Uncomment mode, which allows you to includ a block of remarked out VB.NET code and have it un-remarked during the migration process. (It is a great way to include large pieces of VB.NET code in the middle of a VB6 source file.) You can find an usage example here:
[HOWTO] Exclude portions of VB6 code from the migration process and replace it with custom VB.NET statements
We changed the way we deal with Empty and Null values. In previous releases, these values were migrated to VB6Empty and VB6Null constants, and both of them were set equal to Nothing. Using constants was necessary to support Null and Empty values when they appear as default values for optional parameters, as in this statement
Sub Test(Optional x As Variant = Null)
However, using constants didn't make it possible to map the null value to DBNull.Value, and a few beta testers complained about this. Thus we decided to map these values to Empty6 and Null6 properties, which by default are equal to Nothing and DBNull.Value, respectively, but can be changed if necessary. You can find more details in this article:
[HOWTO] Deal with Null and Empty values
Another minor improvement on previous releases: we have added the VB6Config class that gathers all the settings that you can change at runtime to fine tune the library's behavior, as explained here:
[HOWTO] Determine whether unsupported member throw an exception at runtime
[HOWTO] Ignore fatal error at runtime
The new VB6Config.FocusEventSupport lets you work around a key difference in how VB6 and VB.NET deal with LostFocus and Validate events:
[INFO] Controlling the LostFocus and Validate event sequence
We are including a new extender that allows you to create a text file containing the list of all the migration issues and warnings. It's a precious feature when you migrate multiple projects in batch mode. You can read more details in this article:
[HOWTO] Create a report with all the migration issues and warnings
We also added a few KB articles that illustrate non-obvious way to use PostProcess pragmas, for example:
[HOWTO] Modify project-level options in VB.NET programs
[HOWTO] Enforce project-level Option Strict Off settings in VB.NET programs
Last but not the least, we have fixed 35 bugs. As usual, beta tester can find the complete list in the VERSION HISTORY.TXT file.