Tag Archives: Legacy

Downloading Old Visual Basic 6 Libraries

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Migrating old Visual Basic 6 applications to work on Windows 7 can be hard work. Microsoft gives a “it just works” guarantee for the old run-time but not the common and custom control packages heavily used in the past.

The Visual Basic 6 common controls package including most of the old libraries is available for download from Microsoft, but it could not get it to install on my Windows 7. Many of the libraries are also available for download on various download sites, but these files cannot be fully trusted.

I took a closer look at my Visual Basic 6 IDE installation running on one of my virtual machines and noticed that many of the libraries had a dep file by the same name. The dep files are Visual Basic setup wizard dependency files used by the old installers to point the location from where the library could be downloaded. All of these dep files pointed to the following URL:

http://activex.microsoft.com/controls/vb6/

For my surprise the URL still worked! Using the address one can download any on the old libraries simply by adding the library name and the cab extension to the address, e.g. to retrieve the library dblist32.ocx I used the URL http://activex.microsoft.com/controls/vb6/dblist32.cab. All the common libraries like comdlg32.ocx and dblist32.ocx are there! The server returns a cab file containing the ocx file and an inf file. After downloading all you need to do is to extract the ocx file, put it in your windows\system32 directory and register it using regsvr32.

Unfortunately the more you play around with the old libraries the quicker you face the old dll hell. The ocx libraries often depend on other ocx and dll files that then in turn depend on even more files. None of these dependencies are included in the cab file returned by the server, so to find out what additional files you need, do the following:

  • Check the reference list in the vbp (Visual Basic project) file of the application
  • Google for the dep file of the library you need to use
  • Look into the vb6dep.ini for hints.

If you need to migrate even older applications starting from VB3, you can start by downloading the old run-times from here.