Running Visual Studio 6 C++ in Windows 8.1

Question

I recently migrated my system to windows 8.1. Unfortunatly like some others, I am not able to start Visual Studio 6 anymore. The software is crashing at startup (splash scre

Answer 1

I had a critical need to use VS 6 to continue development of a large MFC application on my Win8 box after upgrading to 8.1. I followed advice from here and elsewhere to copy MSDEV.EXE into a file with a different name (let's call it MSDEVX.EXE) and to change the compatibility settings for the new program to Win 8.0. Unfortunately, the app ran very slowly as a debuggee whenever it used the HeapXxx APIs or an CHttpFile object. I concluded that the problem was the "Fault Tolerant Heap" shim. I cast about wildly for a way to get rid of the FTH shim, and I eventually found one:

I created another copy of MSDEV.EXE -- let's call it MSDEVQ.EXE. I installed the Application Compatibility Manager and followed the instructions to create a custom database with an Application Fix for MSDEVQ.EXE. To create the settings, you'd think you could just copy the MSWIN8 settings and then subtract out the FTH shim. Alas, there is a bug that prevents you from saving the resulting database. Microsoft arrogantly says it won't fix this bug because you should never need to copy compatibility settings. Fine, so I copied the shims one by one, leaving out the FTH shim that's part of MSWIN8. I saved and installed the resulting .sdb file. Voila! No more FTH shim, and I'm back to being able to debug effectively.