IS Architect Resources

The aim of this blog is to capture recommended web resources for information system architects

Monday, June 27, 2005

VB6 to .NET

I need to evaluate whether to recommend migrating a pile of stuff from VB6 to .NET.
Federico Zufaly, whose company Artinsoft built the migration wizards for Microsoft, is quoted in this DevX article... http://www.devx.com/vb/Article/16822/1954?pf=true as saying that VB developers first accept the following immutable truths:
  • You should not attempt migration until after your migration team has studied and learned the .NET environment
  • Migration, particularly the first time you do it, is going to be very frustrating
  • Migration is in no way a hands-off process
  • Some applications simply cannot be migrated automatically
  • The only applications worth migrating are those which the company intends to significantly enhance with functionality that only .NET can provide.

In other words, if you've imagined a process by which one loads some VB6 code into the wizard, does a few days' worth of debugging and testing, and emerges with a VB.NET application, you are living a fantasy. And the sooner you abandon that fantasy the better off you will be.

And...

After a developer is sufficiently comfortable with .NET and has spent several weeks in studying the migration process with the tool, Zoufaly says that a migration should progress at an average rate of just 7,000 to 10,000 lines of code per week. Therefore, a 1 million-line VB6 application will take 100 weeks—two years—to upgrade. Seems a little slow for something that Microsoft had the hubris to dub a migration "wizard."

Hmm.

Any way, IT Toolbox has a number of useful looking links here.