Do you have tons of VB6 code still running in your organization? I’m always surprised in our consulting and debugging work how much VB6 code is still running. I’m a strong advocate of not breaking working code, but with Microsoft ending all support for VB6 in March, 2008 you need to start planning, if you haven’t already, what you’re going to do with that code.
My good friend Francesco Balena has just announced his latest project, VB Migration Partner, which will migrate VB6 code to Visual Basic .NET. It looks absolutely fantastic and Francesco and his team are getting a conversion rate of 99.9%! In the million+ lines of VB6 code they’ve run through VB Migration Partner, they hit only one compilation error per 1,100 lines of code. Francesco told me that this was one of the hardest projects he’s ever done. However, knowing Francesco who’s one of the smartest, and nicest, people I’ve ever met in this business, VB Migration Partner will have rock solid quality.
If you’ve been at a loss to a VB6 migration strategy, now you’ve got an answer.
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I am grateful for what Francesco and his team have done to help improve the credibility of translation technology as a key component of a successful migration strategy.
We are also releasing a VB6 to .NET migration tool. We have a very high yield like the VBMP, but our approach differs in several ways:
1) We offer translation to both VB.NET and C# -- you choose,
2) We do not require any changes to the source code, instead we use translation control scripts to add information if needed
3) We try to minimize use of a proprietary runtime library; rather we use .NET classes directly whenever possible
4) We can also translate ASP classic to ASP.NET with the VBScript going to VB.NET or C#.
I'm just starting to research Francesco Belena's tool. Belena introduces a concept called pragmas that allow you to give specific instructions to the conversion utility on how to perform the conversion. These pragma instructions are inserted into the original source code on anywhere from a project level basis to a line by line basis. I'm not sure claiming a 99.99% rate is an accurate description given all the manual effort required to achieve it. It would be interesting if we knew what the conversion rate is before all pragma instructions are inserted.