It has been about 4 years and still the article that pops up first in Google when searching for "VB Migrations" is an article published in the dawn of .NET: Lori Piquet's "Abandoning the Fantasy of VB Migration Wizardry" (http://www.devx.com/vb/article/16822 ).
It is clear that the article was published to drive readers more than to provide a tool to help customers make a decision. Since I was the person who supposedly provided the reasons to demonstrate that a VB conversion was not possible and since it has been 4 years, it is about time I "defend" myself against her claims.
So, if you have read this blog, you must know by now that VB upgrades are not only possible, but they are actually a very good option for companies that wish to leverage their software assets. In fact, during the past 4 years there have been many demonstrations of this fact and corporations are doing VB6 conversions and they are quite happy with the results. With the publication of the VB Upgrade Guide from Microsoft (with strong input from ArtinSoft), the assessment tool, and ArtinSoft VB Upgrade Companion the magic is actually happening!
Lori said: "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."".
Well, how many production quality lines does a great software developer writes per week? A few hundreds maybe? So, if there is a process that automatically allows you to pretty much rewrite your application to a new platform in a very consistent way, allows you to bridge the obsolescence gap at a rate that is more than an order of magnitude the normal rate of development? How would you call it? I think “Wizard” is not such a bad name after all. I am certainly not trying to say the process is magic and I also believe that "File-Open-Convert" from inside Visual Studio might not be the right gesture to set up proper expectations in terms of a conversion project, but it is true that the process is there and it works very well.
By the way, I am not making up the productivity statistics for software developers. The Software Productivity Research Institute (www.spr.com ) publishes such statistics and they more than confirm what I am saying.
I guess time was on my side and, today, nobody would argue about weather VB6 automatic conversions are magical or not. It is clear that there is a methodology behind, it is clear that they cannot be approached as ad-hoc projects and it is clear that they benefit customers and are less risky, and more cost-effective than manual software rewrites.
As always, I invite you to share your experiences. Don’t forget that I still have prizes for you!