A great tutorial @ Using Unicode in Visual Basic 6.0
Although Visual Basic 6.0 stores strings internally as Unicode(UTF-16) it has several limitations:
- Ships with ANSI only controls (Label, Textbox, etc.).
- Properties Window in IDE is ANSI only. Unicode strings are displayed as '????'
- PropertyBag automatically converts Unicode strings to ANSI.
- Clipboard functions are ANSI only.
- Menus are ANSI only.
The purpose of this tutorial is to resolve these issues and provide working VB code solutions. The level of difficulty of these solutions vary but in general require intimate knowledge of ActiveX Controls and Classes. Subclassing and API programming are a must to gain functionality that Vb does not directly support.
If you want to make it easy to support UniCode in Visual Basic then take a look at the UniToolbox control suite which replaces all the common VB controls with UniCode aware versions:
http://www.iconico.com/UniToolbox