Updating OLE Reference in VB6 app

Question

I have an old vb6 app that I'm in charge of maintaining that saves, opens, and prints Word documents to a users computer. The other day when we switched from office 2003 to office 2010, I started to get complaints that the software would no longer open saved reports and print them. Removing Officer 2010 and installing 2003 fixes the problem.

The sub procedure that handles this is all vanilla msdn code and I'm unable to find anything that would tie it to a certain version of Word. My next thought is perhaps its the OLE dll reference. Where/how can I update the VB6 reference to the dll to work with the new version of office?

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not sure but as a guess it sounds like you are trying to use early binding. If so this is likely your problem.

There are numerous MS KB articles warning about this over a period of over a decade. Examples:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247579

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/245115

In other words: remove all references to any version of Word, declare all of the objects As Object, and use CreateObject() or GetObject() where appropriate instead of Set Obj = New LibName.ClassName.

These KB articles are old now, and the old rules that let you get away with compiling with a reference to Word 95 and still automate Word 2002 don't seem to apply anymore. Besides needing the oldest supported version of Office installed on your dev machine, I suspect upward compatibility was broken beginning in Office 2003.

Your best bet is late binding. The performance penalty is minimal for most programs so the biggest headache is losing IntelliSense.

Answer 2

If you just blindly update the reference, you'll likely break support for Office 2003. if that's not a problem, go for it.

if it is, you'll need to narrow down where in particular, the app is failing. There are some minor differences between revs of the automation model between versions. Not a lot, but they are there.

Most likely, the code is doing something in a way that makes it specific to 2003. MS does a pretty good job of maintaining backwards compat, but they aren't 100%

Answer 3

To answer your question "Where/how can I update the VB6 reference to the dll to work with the new version of office?": You need of course a computer with Office 2010 and VB 6 installed. If you open the project in the VB IDE, you can change the reference to the appropriate Word Library. The references are also noted in the VBP file, e.g. like this

Type=Exe
Reference=*\G{00020905-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}#8.0#409#C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\MSWORD.OLB#Microsoft Word 8.0 Object Library
Reference=*\G{00025E01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}#4.0#0#C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\DAO\DAO350.DLL#Microsoft DAO 3.51 Object Library
Reference=*\G{420B2830-E718-11CF-893D-00A0C9054228}#1.0#0#C:\WINDOWS\system32\SCRRUN.DLL#Microsoft Scripting Runtime

Then recompile. Well, and if you are there, you can just start to debug and see, what happens in detail and why the reports fail. There's no way to change the reference without recompiling, if this was your question.

If it's plain vanilla code related to open, save and print, it's hard to imagine something going wrong.

On the other hand - are there any "base files" in Word format, which are used? May be they have an old format (from Office 95, have just seen this lately). Try to open those files manually and see what happens.