Hook into old VB6 program with C#

Question

Is there any way to hook into an old VB6 program using C# and modify some of its UI? Also, maybe even modify some of its features? I wouldn't know the first thing about doing this but I know you can do stuff like this by injecting DLL's into programs. I just need to do it in C#.

Answer 1

You can't really inject DLLs into programs unless they were designed to do that, for instance with a plugin architecture.

That said you can slightly mess with the UI of the application by using some specific Windows API calls. For instance, many, many years ago, I used this method to change the look of Excel.

Check out the link - it includes the source code and some images of the affected changes.

Answer 2

If you don't have the source code I'd say things are rather difficult. You might look at this book: Gray Hat Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers .

I would suggest Python, because of the plethora of good open source projects and material on the subject. It won't be as easy as just writing C# and having it elegantly mesh into VB code. Good Luck.