VB6Ant

"Build system" for Visual Basic 6 (Classic) that brings the development process of legacy applications to the mordern era. Based on Apache Ant as the declarative build tool and the uniform "Visual Basic 6 (Classic) project structure".

Visual Basic 6 (Classic) project structure

This uniform directory structure is used to keep all the projects the same and have a better user experience when working on it directly and with this "build system". The structure is as follows:

\                           -> includes the project definition, a README.md and Git-related files
\build\                     -> containing all the build artifact, excluded from Git
\scripts\build.xml          -> the actual Ant build script, generated from this library intially
\scripts\VB6Ant\VB6Ant.xml  -> this very library, currently not supporting Git submodules
\src\
  Classes\                  -> contains Class Modules ("*.cls")
  Controls\                 -> contains User Controls ("*.ctl")
  Forms\                    -> contains Forms ("*.frm" and their resources "*.frx")
  Modules\                  -> contains Modules ("*.bas")
  Resources\                -> contains project related resources like icons or other assets

Ant "commands" usable from the library

The library itself does not only provide tasks to be used by Ant projects linked to Visual Basic 6 but also some "commands" that can be used in order to interact with those projects.

Create project structure

To create the project structure from scratch or re-create files/folders after deleting them, run the following command:

ant -buildfile VB6Ant.xml "vb6.project.create"
  -DbaseDir=C:\Users\thahn\source\repos -DprojectName=TestProject

It uses the resources located in the templates directory to create the structure of the new project. It is intended to work with Git out of the box.

Update Ant library

In order to update the Ant library that is copied to each project, run the following command:

ant -buildfile VB6Ant.xml "vb6.project.update"
  -DprojectDir=C:\Users\thahn\source\repos\TestProject

Onboard SonarCloud

In order to onboard the project to SonarCloud with all the necessary properties, run the following command:

ant -buildfile VB6Ant.xml "vb6.project.sonar"
  -DprojectDir=C:\Users\thahn\source\repos\TestProject
  -Dorganization=SonarCloudOrganization
  -Dtoken=SonarCloudToken