The myths about Visual Basic migration make it easy to play the “blame” game instead of trying to understand the issue. Often, in making the wrong assumptions, we “write off” some alternatives without even considering them. However, with training, support from automatic migration products and the use of a comprehensive migration methodology, the migration is not only possible using a fraction of the resources required for a rewrite, but it is also the right choice to reduce the Total Cost of Operation and prepare applications to maximize their future business value. We'll explore everything related to VB6 migration in this blog.

March 2009 - Posts

• Learn about low-cost and low-risk migration options with Avanade and ArtinSoft

  Technorati Tags: Visual Basic Migration,Application Renewal,VB6 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. Posted Mar 18 2009, 07:48 AM by Fzoufaly with 1 comment(s) Filed under: VB6 Upgrade, VB6 migration, VB6 to .NET, ArtinSoft, Automatic Migration, VB6 to C#

• Large Companies, Successful VB6 Migrations

  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. Technorati Tags: VB6 Migration,VB6 to C#,Visual Basic 6 to C#,Visual Basic 6 to .NET Posted Mar 11 2009, 02:51 PM by Fzoufaly with 1 comment(s) Filed under: VB6 Upgrade, VB6 migration, VB6 to .NET, ArtinSoft, Automatic Migration, VB6 to C#

• I've decided to move away from VB6. Now What?

  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? Posted Mar 05 2009, 02:09 PM by Fzoufaly with no comments Filed under: VB6 Upgrade, VB6 migration, VB6 to .NET, ArtinSoft, Automatic Migration, Legacy Code Rewrite