Porting VB Applications to Linux and Mac OS X A how-to guide for Visual Basic developers by Hank Marquis Hank Marquis has been using Visual Basic since version 1.0. He is author of A Visual Basic Programmer's Toolkit (APress), The Visual Basic 6.0 Bible (IDG) and over 35 articles published in CTO/BackOffice, Visual Basic Programmer's Journal (VBPJ), Visual Studio Magazine (VSM) and Microsoft MSDN. He is currently CTO of SlayFire Software Co., creating optimization and performance tools for REALbasic. Reach him at
[email protected] or www.slayfiresoftware.com. Table of Contents Porting Options Beginning Assumptions Porting Considerations Language Keywords Code Syntax Data Types Language Structure User Interface Project Structure Platform APIs Other Considerations Visual Basic Project Converter Additional Resources Table 1. Porting Considerations Table 2. Visual Basic and REALbasic Datatypes Table 3. Getting Ready: The Step by Step Process Preparing Your Code to Use VB Project Converter © 2004 REAL Software, Inc. and Hank Marquis. All rights reserved. Page 1 of 17 Porting Visual Basic applications to Linux and Mac OS X A how-to guide for Visual Basic developers In this white paper, I'll show how you can preserve your investment in Visual Basic by porting your code to Linux and/or Macintosh using REAL Software's REALbasic. I'll provide some examples, share some experience and give you a roadmap for how to port—and how not to port—your Visual Basic apps cross- platform. My intent is to save you some time and pain. For porting our VB projects, we will use REALbasic 5.5.3 for Windows, a modern software development environment that is quite similar to Microsoft Visual Basic® in terms of the GUI and syntax.