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LadderLab

Rescuing a legacy app for electrical engineers

The Learning Pit lost the right to sell Ladder Labs after a licensing deal ended and the developer passed away, leaving a Visual Basic 6 codebase no one could touch. Ollon stripped every restricted asset to clear it legally and replaced the licensing system with a modern alternative, keeping functionality intact. The Learning Pit can sell again, with universities renewing licenses every two years.

Situation

The Learning Pit, an educational software company serving electrical engineering students, found itself unable to sell its flagship Windows application, Ladder Labs, after a licensing agreement with a third party expired following the death of the original developer. The rights holder threatened legal action unless all references to their software were removed from the product, leaving the company with a legacy codebase written in Visual Basic 6 and no internal development resources to address it.

Solution

Reviving the application meant first restoring the ability to compile a legacy system, which required reconstructing a development environment for an operating system and framework that are no longer supported. With that foundation in place, Ollon removed every asset and reference to meet the legal requirements while keeping the product's full functionality intact. Working within the constraints of Visual Basic 6, the team replaced the outdated licensing system with SolidLicense VB6, a compatible modern alternative that restored commercial viability without a full rebuild.

Results

The Learning Pit received legal clearance to resume selling Ladder Labs, with trusted professors and university partners actively testing the restored application ahead of broader distribution. Ollon continues to support the engagement through ongoing bug resolution, infrastructure assistance, and a website redesign as the product re-enters the market. With universities renewing lab licenses on a regular cycle, the client is positioned to rebuild license volume across their existing network.

Technologies

Visual Basic 6

Our Expertise in Action

Application Triage and Rescue

An educational software company lost the right to sell its flagship engineering training application after a third party licensing deal ended and the original developer passed away, leaving a legacy Visual Basic 6 codebase that no one internally could touch. Ollon stripped every restricted asset and reference from the codebase to satisfy the legal requirement, keeping the product's full functionality intact, and replaced the outdated licensing system with a modern, compatible alternative. The company's lawyers cleared the application for sale again, and trusted professors are now testing it against their existing course projects ahead of a wider release to the university labs that renew licenses every two years.

Visual Basic 6

The Learning Pit's flagship application, Ladder Labs, was built entirely in Visual Basic 6, a language with no internal expertise left at the company and no active support from Microsoft. The application no longer runs on modern Windows machines, so Ollon set up a virtual machine that could still compile and run the original VB6 code, then replaced the outdated licensing system with SolidLicense VB6, a modern alternative built for that same language. The result was a fully functional, commercially viable application without a rewrite into a newer language or framework.

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