Last Christmas my trusty old celeron tower got fried this year I received a brand new Pentium Dual Core 4GBRAM 500GB Hard Drive, Intel HD Graphics, Windows 7 Toshiba Satellite Laptop as a gift from my Aunt. I reinstalled Visual Studio Enterprise Edition only to find that I cannot even execute executables created under VB6 other than those that use but the most basic of functions, Windows, buttons etc. No DirectX program works or any other program save the most basic function ones. Please help!!!!

Compatibility Mode/XP Mode?

first of all they should work you just need to install the vb6 runtimes. Its not too dificult to move to vb.net, or even c# for that matter. Then you can use managed dx, or xna. It seems dificult at first took me about 1 day to move from vb6 to vb.net and about 1 hour to move to c# from vb.net. you will find that you can do everything much faster and more eficiently.

That and dish out hundreds to thousands of dollars which I don't have to all those that suggest such a thing keep in mind not everybody has tons of money to burn. In any event I managed to restore most of the functionality after I set VB6 to run as an Administrator. Still executables that use DirectX 7, DirectX8 or Windows XP text to speech service capability won't work.

Visual Studio Express is free isn't it? IIRC the XNA components are free downloads too.

VB6 is very outdated now. The issues you're having will only get worse, Windows 8 isn't far away. I'd give serious consideration to moving onto a more modern language.

_________________
10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

It's simply that the dx7/dx8 wrappers for vb6 are not part of the windows 7 install.

You can (1) attempt to install these wrappers in windows 7, or (2) use an OS that supports vb6 out of the box.

_________________
I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Downloading a useless interpreter? What the hell for?

I've downloaded Open4GL BASIC and FreeBASIC already as alternatives as I said not everybody has thousands upon thousands of dollars to burn and I am in that group.



Wrappers? I've always known them as SDKs (Source development kits) but anyway I did find and download both SDKs to no avail. What bothers and intrigue me the most is why the executables won't work.

Wrappers are not the SDK: The wrappers in question are the files DX8VB.DLL, DX7VB.DLL

These allow vb6 to interface with dx7 and dx8 subsystems.

_________________
I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Couldn't have you just said DLLs? Anyway I downloaded the missing DLLs and all works great now thanks.

No, because they're not independent libraries. The wrappers are part of the dx8 subsystem, and they only work in conjunction with that whole.

When I said "You can attempt to install these wrappers in windows 7", I meant via the full dx8 package.

_________________
I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Well they should have come with the SDKs but didn't so I had to download them separately.

Visual Studio Express is not an interpreter... nor is XNA... so I'm not sure I understand the "useless interpreter" rage. And, they are both free.

VS Express does allow you to run without compiling for VB.Net (and maybe C#, I can't seem to recall), so I guess in a sense it could be considered an interpreter... in precisely the same sense that VB 6.0 can be considered an interpreter -- only with VB 6.0 being the more "useless" of the two, even if by the virtue of it being a victim of forced obsolescence. And I'm sure you paid more for VB 6.0 ten years ago than you will have to pay for the *free* Visual Studio Express right now.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Any language that does not compile is an interpreter just FYI. Visual Studio Enterprise Edition can compile that's the difference and humongous one it is...

Oh -- so you're talking about native compilation. In other words, you don't want your executable to rely on a framework like .Net?

Hmm... but wait -- doesn't VB 6.0 also rely on a framework like .Net (but not .Net specifically -- rather, the VB 6.0 runtime DLL)?

Interpreted languages can be compiled. It's called bytecode. There is a difference between native compilation, and bytecode compilation, though. Just FYI. (VB 6.0 uses bytecode compilation -- or, more accurately, it uses a bit of a hybrid setup, which uses a native executable to "wrap" the bytecode.)

Don't get me wrong, here -- I am not faulting anyone for using an interpreted language (I've worked with interpreted languages for probably half of my programming life). But if your top priority is to avoid interpreters and interpreted languages, you could try assembly (which I do not recommend -- it is a great skill to have, but your code is not very portable), or maybe C or C++ (which I would be more inclined to recommend, as it is more portable).

To be honest, I'm not sure if any version of Visual Basic released beyond the DOS days hasn't relied on an interpreter in some form or fashion. I am unsure of your reasons for despising interpreters, but you should know that VB 6.0 falls under that category.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

I would not call a program that needs to run specifically within any language as an executable as opposed to just a DLL or library of DLLs depending on the complexity of the program. In short any program not ending in .EXE, COM etc as opposed to .BAS is not an executable not in the real sense anyway.

OK.

Just so you know -- the Express edition of Visual Basic .Net 2010 does compile to .EXE files.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

vb.net express compiles to .exe! as does C#. You may have confused .net with QBasic...ahh the good ol' days. remember when the gorilla threw that banana and blew up the building? good times, good times.

_________________
The path to hell is paved with clever code.

Ohh my days i remember that, amazing how much things have changed.