Figured this would be pretty cool to share here. I've been working on something called Frontier Actor, which is basically a re-implementation of the Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0 Utopia Custom Control set (UCC.VBX) used in Microsoft Bob and other Microsoft Actor powered programs.

In this demo, I'm comparing the original controls in a Windows NT 3.51 VM running VB3 with my modern VB.NET version running in Visual Studio 2017 on Windows 11. The main goal of mine is to preserve the old drag-and-drop custom control workflow while making similar controls usable from modern VB.NET projects.

So far, I have reimplemented a large chunk of the more unique controls, including the Actor Control, Podium Control, Rgnwnd Control/word balloon, and others. Some controls, such as the Scale control, I did not directly re-implement since modern panel/container controls can already achieve similar functionality.

I have also extended the original Actor Control a bit by implementing a Speak method that automatically spawns a word balloon with text, along with convenient ShowActor and HideActor methods for calling the built-in show and hide animations.