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Some of the developers here installed 8.1 last night and when we went to boot up VC6.. and instant crash on the splash screen. We have tried the standard compatibility changes, run as administrator, etc etc and no luck. Anyone else have these issues as well? Have you been able to resolve them anyway?

It worked last night on Windows 8 just fine...

Details on crash.

  1. Go to msdev.exe
  2. Double click msdev.exe
  3. Splash screen opens.
  4. Crash. (Microsoft Developer Studio has stopped working)
MTAG11
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    You do of course realize that support for VS6 ended... like, a long time ago? – John Dibling Oct 18 '13 at 13:11
  • Our application was developed in VC6 years ago, and while we use the new dev environments we still have not ported our main application over. (Massive massive project) – MTAG11 Oct 18 '13 at 13:15
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    Then don't use Windows 8.1 to develop in Visual Studio 6. It's simple - if you don't port your application to new dev environments, then don't port your old, unsupported dev environment to new OS's. – Daniel Daranas Oct 18 '13 at 13:19
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    @MTAG11 We are not telling you what to do. If your boss wants to use the old IDE with Windows 8.1, _even though it crashes_, then he's free to do so. Your productivity will decrease to zero because you will not be able to write any code, but he's free to do so if that pleases him. If instead he wants you to actually _do_ something, then he'll need to use a combination of IDE and OS which doesn't crash. – Daniel Daranas Oct 18 '13 at 13:28
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    Does windows 8 still have XP mode? I have used this in windows 7 to test my old VC6 code. – drescherjm Oct 18 '13 at 13:40
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    @DanielDaranas I understand that completely. I just posted here to see if anyone else has ran into this problem and found a solution. – MTAG11 Oct 18 '13 at 13:53

2 Answers2

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I had the same problem but this is how I got around it.

I installed Daffodil from codeplex (http://daffodil.codeplex.com/) and then opened my VC++ project in VS2010 (go through project upgrade routine). Right click on the properties of your project (not the solution) and go to the 'Configuration Properties', 'General' section. Change the 'Platform Toolset' to v60 and your project will now compile with the VC++6 compiler. Note: you must have VC++6 installed - see the Daffodil documentation. Now you can use the VS2010 IDE to compile all your VC++6 code!

SteveR

user2902327
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    Related: [Is it possible to use the VC++ 6 compiler in Visual Studio 2012?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15029762/is-it-possible-to-use-the-vc-6-compiler-in-visual-studio-2012) – chue x Oct 21 '13 at 18:46
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I have been successful with another method (similar to the method of @szc982):

  1. Go to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\Bin"
  2. Rename "MSDEV.exe" into "MSDEV-S.exe" (or any other name)
  3. Right-Click on "MSDEV-S.exe" > Properties > Compatibility > Change Settings for all users
  4. Check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" and click on "OK"
  5. Go to "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0"
  6. Right-Click on the shortcut "Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0" and change the target to "MSDEV-S.exe"

Hope it helps

Note: Be sure when you install VC 6 to perform a custom installation and uncheck "Data Access".

Jean-Francois T.
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  • WE noticed that as well. But we actually just migrated our entire solution to 2013/Unicode. But I can validate that this works. – MTAG11 Apr 03 '14 at 19:33