The VB Team has just announced the release of a VB.NET / VB6 Interop toolkit, complete with source. For those of us that work in shops that still maintain a fair number of legacy applications, this could be quite useful. Here’s the description straight from Microsoft:

The Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 is a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .NET WinForms in a Visual Basic 6 application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time. The goal is a phased upgrade, with production releases at the end of each iteration containing both Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET forms running in the same Visual Basic 6 process.

My favorite thing about this release is the inclusion of the source code* – I always love taking a peek at how MS writes code. As a side note to all this, this is just one part of the new Visual Basic 2005 Power Pack, a collection of controls, components and add-ins – all free. This is one worth looking at.

Note: You’ll find the source if you take a look in this folder:

X:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs\Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0\SDK\Source