There are still many myths out there surrounding software migrations. Through all the years we have found not only that many people still ignore that there are automatic migration tools available, but some believe that automation is just more trouble than it’s worth, and that, besides, it is just plain better to start from scratch. To concur with this idea is, for starters, to simply devalue all of the effort and thought that was put into developing the application, therefore willing to risk years of business knowledge embedded in these systems.
In any case, the truth is that a rewrite from scratch implies a much more difficult task, but due to these misconceptions, valuable resources are wasted in projects that sometimes just never get to see a successful ending. There’s no doubt that any software renewal project isn’t a simple, overnight task, but a well-planned automated migration can make the process comparatively painless. So once you learn about the availability of advanced migration technologies that allow generating code of a superior quality, with a much lower project cost, time and risk, you will definitely agree that using automated migration tools as part of an overall software renewal initiative is the most viable way to leverage the current investment in legacy applications and move them to the latest platforms.
With that in mind I just wrote a white paper highlighting the main myth-debunking reasons why an automatic migration is a far better software modernization approach than a manual rewrite, based not only on ArtinSoft’s own experience in migration projects but on all the customer and industry analyst feedback and evidence gathered over the years.
So click on the link and read or download for free the “5 myth-busting reasons for choosing an automatic migration vs. a manual rewrite” white paper.
Last month we delivered a webcast around the different options to get applications originally
developed in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 running on the Windows 7 operating
system. It also covered some of the business reasons for getting applications to
work with Windows 7 and the benefits provided by that operating system and the
.NET Framework. We did this with Microsoft Latinamerica, so it was in Spanish, but many people asked for an English version of the presentation. Hence, we partnered again with Microsoft to develop a similar webcast entitled “Visual Basic 6 and Windows 7: Alternatives for Application
Compatibility”, scheduled for Thursday, October 15, 2009 1:00 PM Pacific Time. This live
event is part of Microsoft’s “Momentum” initiative, which is designed for growing
and mid-sized organizations and provides expert advice, tips, and techniques to
align IT with your strategy and drive your business forward.
Register
for this free VB6 / Windows 7 compatibility webcast
Recently, one of customers in the UK, an
Independent Software Vendor with headquarters in Bristol, told us that they managed
to save about 14 man/months by using ArtinSoft’s VB
to .NET tool to migrate their flagship application, comprised by 59
VB6 projects and a total of more than 550,000 lines of code.
We are talking about a
critical, comprehensive processing platform used by insurers, managing agents,
third party administrators and business process outsourcers, with installations
in the UK, Ireland, USA, Middle East, Far East, China and Africa, and Activus
really needed to ensure compliance for these customers in the international
health insurance sector.
There were definitely
some time constraints, plus the value and complexity of the business logic
embedded in the application didn’t favor a manual rewrite. So they licensed the
Visual Basic Upgrade Companion and performed
the migration in-house, and managed to maintain the current application’s
architecture while moving the visual controls to .NET native controls.
Additionally, coding patterns were consolidated, and data access models (ADO) were
upgraded to ADO.NET.
In the end, Activus not
only was able to cut down the migration time substantially, but the benefits of
the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion went beyond time and cost reductions: the
resulting code was far superior from the one generated by other migration
tools. As Chris Routleff-Jones, Solution Architect at Activus puts it: “We found the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion
to be a very powerful, easy to use migration product. Not only did it speed up
the conversion process, allowing us to save time and money, but we ended up
with high quality, 100% native .NET code. In fact, we were particularly
impressed by the VBUC’s ability to analyze the code and detect patterns that
are upgraded to .NET-like, native structures, making the output fully readable
and maintainable”.
Read
the complete Activus VB to .NET migration case study
Using ArtinSoft’s
powerful VB to .NET migration tool to convert their 3,000,000 lines of code
Sistema Professionista to VB.NET, Wolters Kluwer Italia saved 2 years of work,
while increasing developer productivity and ensuring continued application evolution.
Based in Milan, Italy,
IPSOA is part of Wolters Kluwer, a leading global information services and
publishing company. Their Accounting/Fiscal client/server system was a suite of
applications developed in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 that required deployment
on a per-customer basis, using an installer for each workstation. IPSOA
required a more sophisticated deployment approach for its thousands of clients,
plus ensuring continued support from Microsoft and application evolution while
maintaining the current architecture, so they licensed ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade
Companion to migrate the flagship application to VB.NET. ArtinSoft’s VB to .NET migration product was
able to comply with very explicit requirements, like using COM Interoperability
to interact with the libraries and controls used in the original system,
mapping of the Datafield property of some controls to a new generated class,
precise solutions for the conversion of the Recordset Source Property, While
statement, Redim and Control Arrays, and implementing support for additional
third-party controls
Through a phased
upgrade approach recommended by ArtinSoft, the customer was able to reduce even
further the risk and amount of allocated resources on the migration project,
while keeping in parallel the development and maintenance of the VB 6.0 code.
Overall, the migration to the .NET platform will strengthen the technological
advantage over competing products and will open the possibilities for quick
application enhancement, with highly increased developer productivity.
As Roberto Fusè, lead resource at IPSOA for the VB migration project said, “ArtinSoft is a qualified company that has
made of the intelligent automation one of its prerogatives of core business. By
using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, IPSOA was able to save 2 years of
work, receiving from ArtinSoft’s the support necessary to customize the tool, which
allowed the evolution of the product using the features of Microsoft’s .NET
Framework and the new development tools”.
Read
the complete Wolters Kluwer Italia VB to .NET migration case study.
We
have partnered with Microsoft to deliver another VB6 to .NET migration webcast
next Tuesday, August 04, 2009 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Presented
by Esteban Brenes, Migration Specialist at ArtinSoft,
this 1-hour live presentation addresses concerns about the termination of all
development support for Visual Basic 6 and other business and technical
drivers, providing a detailed explanation on how to move ahead while preserving
the capital invested in applications in the most cost-effective way.
Register now for this free VB migration webcast
We’ve just released a new VB6
and ASP Assessment Tool, which analyzes Visual Basic 6.0 and ASP projects in
order to obtain an inventory of the code, components and their relationships. It
generates a group of HTML and Excel reports that can be used as the basis for
further calculations related to the effort and cost of converting the application
to Visual Basic .NET, C#, and ASP.NET. The tool is free to download,
very simple to install and run, and
you can use the results to obtain a quick
ballpark for a turn-key project performed by ArtinSoft or find out how
much will a license of our Visual Basic Upgrade Companion will cost (use the number of code plus design lines in
both cases).
We’ve just released a new case study
that shows how one of our customers saved lots of time and money by using our Visual Basic Upgrade Companion tool
to migrate its flagship application from VB to .NET. Based in South Africa, MDA Property Systems provides software solutions to the real state
sector. Its MDA Property Manager application is a comprehensive package for
rent collection, lease management, facilities management, integrated property
accounting and asset management, employed by more than 1800 users across 250
companies. With more than 600,000 lines
of VB6 code it encapsulated decades of business knowledge, so MDA licensed
our tool to perform the conversion to VB.NET with minimal risk and using their
own internal resources, after discarding a manual rewrite and the Upgrade
Wizard
Also, it was very important for MDA to use the newest
technology instead of just being able to run Visual Basic 6 style code inside
the .NET Environment, and using ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion
guaranteed that they will be getting native
.NET code, without any ties to third-party runtimes. 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. It allowed MDA to save on valuable
resources: total savings for this
project were more than 3 years of development time and US$300,000, and they
are now ready to start taking advantage of compelling new features that will
extend the technological life of its product.
Read the complete MDA case study here
Starting tomorrow January 27th we will be
engaging with Microsoft on a campaign aimed
towards helping companies and developers in the UK move their Visual Basic 6.0
applications to the .NET platform. This is not the first time we provide
migration solutions in that territory,
since we have lots of customers
there already (you can read some of our case studies and references here), but this is the first occasion
we join forces on a massive scale effort locally with 2 of our major partners:
Microsoft and Avanade. ArtinSoft will be providing tools, resources and
guidance, along with limited-time offers during this campaign. For example, we’ll
have a 10% discount on licenses of our Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion for the enterprise level, while launching the Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion Developer Edition at a special introductory price
of only £199. For those who require a turn-key solution, we have also partnered
with Avanade to deliver the most
comprehensive, cost-effective Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET migration solution. So
if you are based in the UK and still have Visual Basic 6.0 investments that
need to be leveraged, click here to learn
more about this campaign, and contact us as soon as possible to take advantage
of this unique opportunity.
If you are familiar with VB to .NET migration projects, you
certainly know by now that this is not a trivial task. And with the state of
the economy today, saving up on scarce, valuable resources is a must. That’s
when an automated software migration solution proves to be the most viable
approach, constituting the most cost-effective, non-disruptive method of application
renewal.
I recently read an excellent article in ASP.NET PRO magazine, where Alvin Bruney offered some
insight on the challenges of migrating VB6 applications, providing some
estimation on the overall effort. For starters, he accurately notes how a large
part of the cost in these projects is related to the QA process, something
we’ve definitely seen in large, complex enterprise application upgrades, as it
usually represents around 50% of the total time.
He then provides some numbers regarding the cost for VB to
.NET migration projects: $1/LOC for simple applications, $3-$7/LOC for large
enterprise systems, and $10-$15/LOC for the more complex ones. However, this
varies a lot from one project to another, depending not only on the complexity
of the application and target requirements, but also on the quality of the tools
and the skills available for the migration. For example, due to a proven
methodology, consultants with broad experience in VB to .NET migration projects
and powerful conversion tools, a turn-key solution delivered by ArtinSoft,
taking care of the complete migration up to functional equivalence in the
target language, is generally between $1-$2 per line of source code. This includes the Supplier Testing activities,
though not the User Acceptance Testing, where the customer finally certifies functional
equivalence through predefined test cases. And of course there are other
post-migration costs involved, like those related to the new application’s deployment
and enhancement, but I think it is safe to say that the cost per line of code
for the migration itself, on a turn-key basis, is rarely higher than $3.
Moreover, when
time to market is a critical factor, this automated migration solution just
can’t be beat. For example, a recent customer estimated that rewriting from
scratch his highly complex, business critical, 100,000+ LOC VB6 application
would take him up to 2.5 years, while using ArtinSoft’s comprehensive solution
allowed him to release the C# version in less than 6 months. And using only
about 1/17th of the resources required for a rewrite. Expect the
case study soon, but trust me: we’re not talking n00bies here ;-) And another
example I mentioned on my last post
described how a recent customer
cut down the project time in 1 year, representing savings of about $160,000.
On the other hand, calculating how much it will cost for someone who licenses
our Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to perform the migration in-house is more complicated,
since it depends greatly on his dexterity. But just to provide another example
of how much our solution reduces the effort, another customer with a 550,000
LOC application recently told us he managed to save 14 man/months by using ArtinSoft’s tool
internally, instead of the Upgrade Wizard that ships with Microsoft’s Visual
Studio.
In any case, as Bruney wrote on the aforementioned article “automation
is the key to containing cost”. But watch out for conversion tools that will
only cause you to waste your time and money. Some of our customers have tried
some of these options in parallel before choosing our tool, but a few were
lured instantly by the deceivingly low prices. Most of the latter have come to
us in the end, frustrated with the poor results.
By the way, the article says that “the migration tool takes
you to VB.NET only”. I assume the author is talking about the Upgrade Wizard,
since even a couple of the tools I referred to above convert to C#, but the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion is
the only one that allows migrating effectively to both VB.NET AND C#. Finally,
if you have settled for C# as the target language, I should warn you again
about the infamous double-jump approach, that is, converting from VB6 to VB.NET
and then to C# (the author mentions this option, though he doesn’t exactly
recommends it). We’ve seen a couple of customers who tried that and found it
really problematic, to say the least. In fact, they finally decided it was a
whole lot easier starting all over from VB6 and using our tool to move to C#
directly.
Today
Eric Nelson covered the
quasi-legendary legacy transformation options graph on his blog.
Taking into account the 4 basic alternatives for legacy renovation, that is, Replace, Rewrite, Reuse or Migrate,
this diagram shows the combination of 2 main factors that might lead to these
options: Application Quality and Business Value. As Declan Good
mentioned in his “Legacy
Transformation” white paper, Application Quality refers to “the suitability
of the legacy application in business and technical terms”, based on parameters
like effectiveness, functionality, stability of the embedded business rules,
stage in the development life cycle, etc. On the other hand, Business Value is
related to the level of customization, that is, if it’s a unique, non-standard
system or if there are suitable replacement packages available.
This
diagram represents the basic decision criteria, but there are other issues that
must be considered, specifically when evaluating VB to .NET upgrades. For
example, as Eric mentions in his blog post, a lot of manual rewrite projects
face so many problems that end up being abandoned. One of ArtinSoft’s recent
customers, HSI,
went for the automated migration approach after analyzing the implications of a
rewrite from scratch. They just couldn’t afford the time, cost and disruption involved. As Ryan Grady, owner of the
company in charge of this VB to .NET migration project for HSI puts it, “very quickly we realized that upgrading the
application gave us the ability to have something already and then just improve
each part of it as we moved forward. Without question, we would still be working
on it if we’d done it ourselves, saving us up to 12 months of development time
easily”. Those 12 months translated into a US$160,000 saving for HSI! (You
can read the complete case
study at ArtinSoft’s website.)
On
the other hand, for some companies reusing (i.e. wrapping) their VB6
applications to run on the .NET platform is simply not an option, no matter
where it falls in the aforementioned chart. For example, there are strict regulations in the Financial and
Insurance verticals that deem keeping critical applications in an environment
that’s no longer officially supported simply unacceptable. Besides, sometimes
there’s another drawback to this alternative: it adds more elements to be
maintained, two sets of data to be kept synchronized and requires for the
programmers to switch constantly between 2 different development environments.
Therefore,
an assessment of a software portfolio before deciding on a legacy transformation
method must take into account several factors that are particular to each case,
like available resources, budget, time to market, compliance with regulations,
and of course, the specific goals you want to achieve through this application
modernization project.