You all know that Visual Basic 6 allows you to choose between Native Code and P-Code compilation.
Because one of the most recurrent questions of my customers was if VBReFormer Pro will support decompilation of their application, due to the simple fact they don’t know if it was compiled in Native or P-Code, I’ve made a tool called “VBCompTester”, some years ago, which show you if a binary file (.exe, .dll, .ocx, etc.) was compiled using Visual Basic 5 / 6 and with what compilation mode (native or P-Code ?).
I have also made this tools because VBReFormer Free edition was not supporting decompilation at all, while VBReFormer Pro does. Then, you were not able to know, by using the free version, if the Pro one will support your application.
But the past year I decided to make VBReFormer Free and VBReFormer Professional from the same wood in order to give a real idea of VBReFormer Professional capabilities by using the free version.
Then, since June 2014, the both version of VBReFormer, free and pro, have the same features, but limited in the case of the Free edition.
Here are the main limitation of the Free Edition:
decompilation engine will not show name of code-inside object property in Free Edition. It will show something like “Me.[PROPERTY NOT VISIBLE IN FREE EDITION]” or “Me. [METHOD NOT VISIBLE IN FREE EDITION](param1, param2, param3)” in free edition; the feature of edition of GUI interface is not supported in Free Edition.
Since the Free Edition can now be used has a demonstration version of the Professional Edition of VBReFormer, I decided to discontinue the tool VBCompTester.
You can, and I advise you to use VBReFormer Free edition in order to know if your binary is made with Native or PCode option.
If you want to know more about the difference between the both compilation modes, you can read the following article: The truth about Native Code VS P-Code.
See you very very soon with a new version of VBReFormer which is gonna be the most powerful version I have made. 🙂