New Demo Video: Your VB6 Project, Now in 64-bit
Hi everyone!
We’ve just published a new demo video, and it shows one of the things we’re most excited about in RAD Basic: taking a real VB6 project with ActiveX dependencies and running it as a native 64-bit application, without changing a single line of code.
Watch it on the header or here:
The project
For the demo, we used a classic VB6 project that relies on two components: the Acrobat Reader ActiveX control (to display PDFs) and CommonDialog. Like every VB6 project opened in RAD Basic, it starts with the 32-bit build profile enabled by default.
Built as 32-bit, the Acrobat Reader control loads just as it would in the original VB6 IDE, and Task Manager shows the process running as x86.
How the jump to 64-bit works
Moving a VB6 project to 64-bit usually stalls on its dependencies. RAD Basic handles this in two ways:
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VB6 runtime components are mapped to reimplemented native components that support both 32-bit and 64-bit.
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Third-party components that ship both 32-bit and 64-bit OCX files are recognized. When they’re ABI-compatible, RAD Basic automatically uses the 64-bit OCX.
Since both dependencies in this project have 64-bit versions available, the 64-bit build profile can simply be enabled.
The result
The project compiles and runs as a 64-bit process. CommonDialog works, the PDF displays correctly, and Task Manager confirms it’s running in 64-bit.
The video was recorded using the latest published nightly build, so everything you see is already available for you to try.
As always, thank you for your support. It’s what makes this work possible.
RAD Basic Team