I am proud to announce that today ArtinSoft released version 4.0 Beta of its flagship product the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion.
This new release once more collects our learnings from migrating millions and millions of lines of code from Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET and C#.
This release revolves around a number of themes:
1) Visual Studio 2010 compatibility: You can now use the VBUC to create projects that are compatible with Visual Studio 2010.
2) Take advantage of new framework features: The code generated by the VBUC now takes advange of some advanced features of the .NET Framework to improve the quality of the code avoiding dependencies to any third party runtime.
3) Compatibility with Windows 7 and 64 bits system: The platform is evolving and the VBUC is evolving along with it. Now the VBUC is compatible with Win XP, Vista and 7 on both 32 and 64 bits systems.
4) Impoved usability: We are trying to minimize the learning curve to start a VB migration project. There will be even more changes in this theme for the next release. (I am specially excited about this!)
Please read our official press release, learn the specifics of version 4.0 or give it a try!
You can also watch a video demo on the Microsoft site channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VSIPMarketing/VSIP-Partners-CAN-DO--ArtinSoft-Visual-Basic-Upgrade-Companion/
Aberdeen Group recently published a report titled “Migrating from VB6 to .NET: The challenge of Software Agility in a Volatile Economy”.
The report contains a good summary of the status quo with respect to Visual Basic 6 renewal efforts. It is based on a survey of 130 organizations at the end of 2008.
The Aberdeen report contains lots of advice for organizations that are faced with the challenge of upgrading their infrastructure, I think it is worth reading it.
ArtinSoft is very proud to have been recognized as a key player in the Visual Basic migration game along with a number of its outsourcing partners. This shows once more how our 15 years trajectory in the migration business is our best letter of presentation.
In his summary of the report, Aberdeen analyst Michael Lock also shows how best in class companies have a much greater tendency to use automatic migration tools to support their porting efforts. During these times of financial uncertainty is more important than ever to minimize the cost of evolving your infrastructure and automation is certainly a good way of doing so. ArtinSoft approach to automatic migration is aimed at minimizing the cost of reaching functional equivalence while at the same time ensuring that all delivered code is completely .NET native and ready to be evolved to the next level by our customers. ArtinSoft offers the best balance between cost speed and future insurance. Jose Aguilar also analyzes some of the conclusions from Aberdeen in this blog post.
If you are deciding what’s your next move with VB6, you should certainly read the Aberdeen report and you should look at our Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 3.0 and our new technical resources site www.VBtoNET.com .
On Wednesday April 15th 2009 Avanade and ArtinSoft will host a webinar on how to quickly and cost effectively renew your Visual Basic 6 applications.
Here’s an excerpt from the invitation:
“Don’t miss this chance to learn more about VBUC and other cost effective migration options, including:
• Which migration strategy works best for you (complete, partial,
coexistent, partial development)
• How to reduce project risk, costs, and time to market
• How to guarantee business continuity by preserving knowledge
invested in legacy applications“
You can RSVP and make sure you don’t forget to attend.
Here is a summary of some recent case studies that we have produced with our customers.
The message is common: Visual Basic 6 to C# migrations are an excellent alternative that saves time and money when you need to move your application to .NET.
HSI
This Texas-based company provides geo-navigation solutions for the horizontal drilling industry, and when the end of official support for the VB6 development environment was announced, they turned to ArtinSoft to migrate their LatNav application from VB6 to C# on a turn-key basis, using a slightly customized version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion.
“Utilizing the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion saved us about one year of development and $160,000. This conversion will allow us to leapfrog well in front of our competition” -- Ken Bowdon - HSI founder
Read the full HSI case study.
MDA
After discarding a manual rewrite and the Upgrade Wizard, MDA –a software services provider for the real estate sector– settled for ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion tool, with which RDO was transformed to ADO.NET, third party controls were converted to native .NET controls, Component One’s True DB grid was upgraded to the latest version of that component, and coding standards that were common place when developing in Visual Basic 6.0 were also migrated to equivalents in VB.NET.
“We looked at different options, like a rewrite and the Upgrade Wizard. The UW couldn’t cater for our needs, especially since we were going from RDO to ADO.NET. A rewrite would have been about a five-year project for us, and possibly in the region of US$500,000. Using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion represented an estimated saving for the project of about 3 years and US$300,000”. -- Rodger Beadle – Technical Director, MDA
Read the full MDA case study.
Vertex
Vertex, a leading global BPO and customer management outsourcing company, managed to ensure compliance and business continuity by upgrading not one, but two mission-critical applications from VB to .NET using a customized version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion (VBUC). These case studies underscore the joint efforts made by both companies, which proved to be decisive to accomplish the goal of having both migrated applications up and running within some serious time constrains.
"ArtinSoft has been an excellent company to work with. They have been responsive to requests from Vertex to change their processes in order to accommodate the way in which we work. They have provided us with daily updates throughout the migration life cycle and have worked in partnership with Vertex to resolve any issues that have arisen in a pragmatic and expedient manner." -- Sue Craig - Senior Project Manager, Vertex
Read the full Vertex Omiga Case Study.
Read the full Vertex Supervisor Case Study.
Banamex / Citigroup
Learn how Banamex, one of the most widely recognized financial institutions in Latin America and purchased by Citigroup in 2001, was able to migrate over 5 million lines of code from VB6 and ASP to C# and ASP.NET using ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, in compliance with Citigroup’s corporate policies for quality assurance and information security. The project also included the creation of an effective collaboration environment and the implementation of highly advanced security tactics in order to guarantee full confidentiality in data handling.
Read the full Banamex/Citigroup Case Study.
At some point in time companies decide they want to leave a certain platform. Let’s not focus on the reasons why they decide to move but on HOW to move instead. Companies reach the decision to move on their own timetable.
Once you have decided that you want to move away from VB6 then ArtinSoft comes into play. The purpose of my blog is to show that there is a way out that is good, fast and cost-effective. Compared to what? You might ask, let’s see.
Once you decide to move (let me be clear, you made the decision to move, then the rest of the discussion applies) you have to assess your applications and make a decision on HOW to move them one by one.
There are three axes along which we recommend our customers to make the analysis:
- How unique is the functionality to your business? For example, if you have a general ledger that does not have any particular features for your business, if you have a “me too” app that does not give you an advantage over your competitors, well, you should consider just buying a package and replace it.
- How good is the technical quality of your source code? Have you followed best practices in VB? Is your code maintainable by a third party? (Can they understand it?) If the answer is no then migrating it to a new language is not going to improve this situation. Consider a rewrite.
- How fast is the functionality changing to meet business goals? Is the business process it supports fixed? Do you anticipate that very minimal changes will happen before retirement? Then you should just leave it as is (one caveat here, in some industries because of regulatory issues you might still make sure you are on a fully supported platform even if the application does not change).
Now, if you have an application that provides you a business advantage, that is of good technical quality and that needs to adapt to new business challenges, then you have a good candidate for a migration.
For applications with the above characteristics, why is a migration better than a rewrite?
- Cost: when we look at cost there are several dimensions.
- Cost of the actual migration process: An automatic migration to functional equivalence can be done with about 20% of the cost of a rewrite. Most of that cost is testing and fine tuning of the application to the new platform.
- Training of end users: Since the application is functionally equivalent it is not necessary to retrain end-users. With a rewrite, chances are that the output is not going to be functionally equivalent unless you follow an algorithmic approach just like an automatic migration and therefore end users need a retraining. In addition to the actual retraining cost (which can be enormous – e.g. we worked with a customer whose system required a 6 weeks training time, for 3000 users. An application replacement or rewrite would have started with that hole in front of them) but the opportunity cost. New software, new mistakes, how does that impact the business continuity?
- Time: An automatic migration process can also be done in about 20% of a rewrite. This means that you can free up resources much faster to actually build new functionality that the business requires instead of attempting to replicate functionality that already works.
- Quality: An automatic migration does not fundamentally change the architecture of the original application (even if certain aspects like data access and some pieces of GUI architecture do change). The question is: do you really need to change the architecture for the whole application? Probably not. You might need to change the architecture for certain processes. The code that is generated by ArtinSoft is completely ready for evolution. No strange variable names, all comments preservation, no restructuring of the code, etc. Even if in the worst case scenario you need to rewrite a certain piece of the application it is always a fraction of the total cost.
Comments?
Danish magazine Version2 published an interesting article last week on VB6 migrations: http://www.version2.dk/artikel/9908-saadan-flyttes-milliarder-af-kodelinjer-fra-vb6#forum_post_anchor .
Microsoft is finally waving goodbye to Visual Basic Version 6. Its successor, VB.Net, is not backward compatible, but the company Artinsoft from Costa Rica can help with a translation machine.
By Tania Andersen, Wednesday 11 February 2009
This article really shows momentum in northern Europe.
Enjoy!
ArtinSoft recently published a number of case studies of Visual Basic migrations for ISVs. The projects were successful both from the technical as well as the economical perspective. If you are an ISV and you are considering an evolution of your application and a port to the .net platform I encourage you to take a look:http://www.artinsoft.com/vertex-omiga-vb-to-net-migration-case-study.aspx
http://www.artinsoft.com/vertex-supervisor-vb-to-net-migration-case-study.aspx
http://www.artinsoft.com/hsi-latnav-vb-to-net-migration-case-study.aspx
In this blog I am trying to be as unbiased as possible in reporting my opinion with regards to VB migrations. This time I am mentioning the case studies as evidence that a lot of the conceptual discussions that I have are actually happening in reality. It is interesting to see how many of the comments to this blog tend to be from skeptics and from people that just love VB6 and do not want to abandon it. My purpose is to show that there is life after VB6 and that an automatic migration is not only possible but, in many cases, a great alternative for your evolution plans.Please let me know what you think of the case studies.
Milan Negovan in his blog aspnetresources recently published an excerpt of Michael Feathers' book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. I liked the excerpt so much and I believe that it is so pertinent to the topic of my blog that I also will reproduce it verbatim.
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Often people who spend time working on legacy systems wish they could work on green-field systems. It’s fun to build systems from scratch, but frankly, green-field systems have their own set of problems. Over and over again, I’ve seen the following scenario play out:
An existing system becomes murky and hard to change over time. People in the organization get frustrated with how long it takes to make changes in it. They move their best people (and sometimes their trouble-makers!) onto a new team that is charged with the task of “creating the replacement system with a better architecture.”
In the beginning, everything is fine. They know what the problems were with the old architecture, and they spend some time coming up with a new design. In the meantime, the rest of the developers are working on the old system. The system is in service, so they receive requests for bug fixes and occasionally new features.
The business looks soberly at each new feature and decides whether it needs to be in the old system or whether the client can wait for the new system. In many cases, the client can’t wait, so the change goes in both. The green-field team has to do double-duty, trying to replace a system that is constantly changing.
As the months go by it becomes clearer that they are not going to be able to replace the old system, the system you’re maintaining. The pressure increases. They work days, nights, and week-ends. In many cases, the rest of the organization discovers that the work you are doing is critical and that you are tending the investment that everyone will have to reply on in the future.
The grass isn’t really much greener in the green-field development.
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I concord 100% with Michael Feathers. Rewriting code is something that can be achieved only at a very large rate of consumption of time and money! My thesis is that migration, specially automatic migration, is often the best option. You can easily change the platform and then focus on rewriting/rearchitecting only the pieces that truly deserve it. This has been proven over and over again at ArtinSoft.