I’d been working quite happily with VB6 and Windows Vista for several days, when, this morning, I ran head long into a very disturbing problem
I had a class open, and was trying to enter:
Private myvar as Boolean
but as soon as I hit SPACE after the AS, long pause and CRASH.
Every time. Completely consistent.
Poking around in the Application Even log yielded this:
Faulting application vb6.exe, version 6.0.81.76, time stamp 0x3592011f, faulting module OLEAUT32.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549bd95, exception code 0xc0000006, fault offset 0x0000d921, process id 0x17e4, application start time 0x01c7cade79735543.
Which seems to clearly point at OLEAUT32.DLL and, I’d guess, the TypeLibrary loading and handling stuff that VB6 makes heavy use of for Intellisense purposes.
My first thought at this point was, holy crap! I’m gonna have to go back to XP to be able to get a stable VB6 environment!
I googled a bit and came up empty.
Then, I heard this voice in the back of my head (no, not those voices, one of the rational ones<g>) that suggested checking the SP level of VB6. Sure enough, I hadn’t installed SP6 (remember, I just repaved this machine a week or so ago).
Interestingly, MS’s update gizmo hadn’t suggested SP6 as an update. Guess their most popular language doesn’t rate high enough on the important scale.
At any rate, I installed SP6 and tried the same coding, worked perfectly.
Lesson of the day, always make sure you snag all the SPs when repaving.
Well, at least that’s one minor panic attack avoided!
3 Comments
(Long chagrined silence)
I’m still on SP5. Need I upgrade my ten-year-old, nearly left-for-dead programming language?
What’s SP6 got? The reason I haven’t done it yet is that SP5 is so wonderfully stable. So…?
Good Question. I’d say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I upped to SP6 quite some time ago and haven’t noticed any issues with it at all. The thing is, I haven’t noticed any issues, good or bad, which does beg the question, why bother?
I guess the main reason is that I believe it’s the SP6 version of the redistributables that go out with Vista (and possibly the latest XP service packs). Things might get "confused" running older SPs of the main VB6 IDE with newer SPs of the redistributables (like MSVBVM6.dll, the OLE libs, etc).
But I’m completely guessing on that, and if you haven’t run into any peculiarities at this point, you’re not very likely to.
There’s definitely probs with VB6, no SPs, though. I can say that with sheepish confidence!
I went through the VB6 SP6 fix list and lo, I seem to have avoided (by accident) all the things that were driving other folks nuts that SP6 addresses.
I don’t use RDO, ListView or TreeView (VSView’s grid is sooo much better), SSTabs, nor SendKeys. I don’t bind ADO recordsets to any of the built-in controls. I’ve never tried to compile the Inet control into an ActiveX control. I don’t use WebClasses.
So I think I’ll stay put with SP5 for the time being, until that day I must compile an ActiveX internet-aware control that utilizes RDO to access a TreeView-bound recordset via a WebClass.
Probably next week.