I’ve seen lots of rants over the years saying things along the lines of

Who wants to use a language that looks like this:

10   Print "Hello, World"
20   If x = 1 Then Goto 50
30   Print "Something else"
50   Print "Result was 50"

Or similiar nonsense. Of course, VB only vaguely resembles this style of code anymore, but one thing has remained virtually the same. Line numbers.

If I remember correctly, in BASCOM and BASICA, they were required. Then Basic Professional Developer System (MS BasicPDS) came out and line nums were no longer necessary, but you could still use them if you liked (probably more to be backwardly compatible with all that old BASICA code).

In all the older VBs (pre .NET days), you actually had to add line numbers to the source code itself in order to get them into the program and refer to them (via the ERL function). While this was certainly doable, the resultant code ended up looking like some seriously old-school mash you wouldn’t want to be caught dead delivering (or trying to maintain).

However, being able to report a line number during an error at runtime, at the client site, so it can be logged or reported back to you as a developer is damn near invaluable. Microsoft recognized this enough in .NET to include line number support built in to the error stack and handling subsystem (although the old style line numbers in code and ERL function still work, appearently).

That’s great for .NET, but there’s still a lot of VB6/5 and older code laying around that has to be maintained. So what do you do?

Ages ago, I built a little command line utility to run through every module in a VBP file (and every module of every project in a VBG file, too), and either add or remove line numbers. It output all the files to the same directory, but with “LINED_” prepended to the file name. This tactic makes it very easy to simply DEL LINED_*.* when you’ve compiled the line numbered project to clean things up and not leave line numbered code sitting around. You can run it against individual BAS, FRM, CTL, DSR, CLS, etc files, but if you point it at a VBP or a VBG file, it’ll even rewrite that file so that it’s contents point to the new file names. This makes it very easy to construct a batch file to 1) line number a project, 2) compile it, and 3) kill off the line numbered source files.

For instance, this batch file:

set pfile=%~dpn0
set pname=%~n0
set pdir=%~dp0
vbliner %pfile%.vbp
VB6.EXE /m "%pdir%LINED_%pname%.vbp"
del "%pdir%LINED_*.*"

Just name it the same name as a VBP file, save it to the same folder as your VBP file, and run it.

It will pull the file name and path from the name of the batch file itself (which should be the same as the VBP you want to compile), line number the project, compile it, then delete the line numbered source files when fnished, leaving you with a nice compiled file, completely line numbered but with none of the mess.

Its other nifty trick is to line number the lines using the same algorithm that the VB6 IDE uses to display line numbers as you move through code, as in:

This one trick (which I haven’t seen in any utility to line number VB source), makes it so that you don’t have to keep the line numbered source around so you can refer to it later. Somebody calls up saying they get an error in Module XYZ, line number 10202, all you have to do is pull that version of the module from SourceSafe (you do use version control of some kind, right?), load it up in VB and jump to the given line number. Can’t get much simpler.

VBLiner starts numbering at 10000, the rational behind that being that if you happen to need to include a hardcoded line number in your code for some reason, the automatic numbers hopefully won’t interfer with your hand coded numbers.

Another handy tip. Once you’ve opened your VB project, Right click the project explorer, select ADD, then ADD FILE. Find the BAT file that you just created above, and be sure and check the “Add as Related Document” box before adding it to your project. Now, then, you should be able to simply DBL CLICK on the BAT file from the VB project explorer to run the bat file and compile your project, complete with line numbers, all automatically.

And a final note; VBLiner does ostensibly support removing line numbers from VB files as well, but I’ve never had much use for that facility, so it’s not well tested. As with any freeware, use at your own risk. And it should go without saying, Back up your source files before running it on them.

Download a zip of the utility here and let me know what you think.