It’s funny how sometimes things come full circle. When I started at my current job, 6 years ago, fresh out of college, one of the very first tasks I was assigned to was integrating a .NET component into a multi-tier VB6 system. The VB6 components communicated over sockets by means of binary-serialized structures, so I ended up implementing the same binary serialization/deserialization protocol in C#. We used it extensively for a while, but It never made it to production because our plans changed shortly thereafter. It was a pretty fun reverse-engineering project nevertheless.
Now I’m about to move on to a different job and while cleaning my workstation I found that little piece of code. It’s not like VB6 is the hot technology in 2012, but throwing it away was a bit of a shame. The company kindly agreed to open source it, so after a quick facelift here it is (and on NuGet), MIT-licensed and ready to be used in any kind of project. Ready to take contributions too!
If it serves as an Out of Jail Free card to at least one person stuck in a VB6 prison I would call mission accomplished!