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 .

Today ArtinSoft launched the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 3.0 both for our Enterprise and Developer Editions.  This latest release of the best (I am biased!) Visual Basic migration tool in the world is focused on reducing the total effort of a migration project.  Together with the conversion tool release we also revamped its companion technical site http://www.vbtonet.com/ .  This site, which will be continuously updated in the following weeks, is the perfect side help to any person that needs to complete a migration project.  It contains everything from a getting started guide to how-to articles with advanced migration topics.

At ArtinSoft we are truly proud of this release and we continue to be fully committed to support our customers in their transition from VB 6 to Visual Basic .NET or C#. 

Specifically, here are the latest additions to the VBUC 3.0.  Click here to get a trial of this exciting product.

VBUC 3.0 New Features

• Windows API and 'Declare' Support
  VBUC 3.0 introduces support for external DLL function declarations and invocations. A vast research was performed to identify the correct way of declaring and passing parameters and return types for primitives, classes, enums, structs, fixed lenght strings, arrays and combinations of these types.
• Increased Support for Windows Common Controls Conversion
  VBUC 3.0 introduces a substantial amount of improvements for the conversion of Windows Common Controls to native .NET controls.  An extensive effort was performed to identify and resolve issues related to these components which are present in most VB6 applications. The main improvements are related (but not limited) to the following controls:  ImageList, ListView, StatusBar, Toolbar, TreeView.
• Public Class Instantiation Models Support
  Public classes in ActiveX EXE/DLL projects may have different instantiation models (multiuse, singleuse, etc.) To achieve the same behavior in .NET a whole conversion solution was implemented and incorporated into VBUC 3.0.
• Default Property Resolution Through Helper
  The VBUC contains a new helper class designed to resolve several late binding issues that are not solved by the typing mechanism. This solution significantly reduces compile errors and EWIs while providing higher functional equivalence.
  This solution resolves the EWIs related to late-binding and default property issues which represent around 50% of known issues from older versions.
• Data Access Conversion Improvements
  The data access conversion to ADO.NET with System.Data.Common has been a very popular feature from the previous VBUC versions.  VBUC 3.0 introduces several improvements to this feature. It includes enhancements to the helper classes functionality as well as additional members coverage (clone, sort, getrows and many others)
• IsMissing Support
  VBUC 3.0 introduces support for the IsMissing function. Since VS.NET doesn't include the concept of missing parameters, VBUC now generates a code pattern that produces the same behavior by taking advantage of nullable types and overloading.
• NotUpgradedHelper for Not-Upgraded Statements and Members Handling
  A very common problem with older versions of VBUC was the handling of NotUpgraded members and statements.  They were usually generating compile or runtime errors that made the post-VBUC manual work more difficult.
  VBUC 3.0 introduces a helper class to report and handle the usages of not supported elements while avoiding compile and runtime errors.
• Multiple improvements to existing features
  Around 450 individual improvements were implemented for VBUC 3.0.  Most of them are related to providing increased automation and enhance the resulting code quality, others are related to other areas such as robustness and graphical interface.

• Speed Boosting
  For VBUC 3.0 several time performance improvements were implemented to achieve a substantial improvement, reducing to 50% the required time to perform an upgrade process.  Additional time improvements could be experienced when converting large projects which used large amounts of memory.
• Reduced Memory Requirements
  Memory usage was also significantly improved.  Based on tests over medium projects we estimate around a 30% improvement.  It is estimated that more significant improvements will be experienced with bigger projects.

• Assessment Tool Integration
  The VBUC Assessment Tool functionality has been incorporated into the VBUC. Users can now execute the assessment process from the VBUC main window. One important advantage of this approach is that users can solve migration warnings before executing the assessment process, allowing the obtention of better quality information.
• Additional Assessment Reports
  Two additional reports have been included into the integrated assessment process:
• An advanced dependency analysis that shows internal-dependency trees per project.
• A shared and potential-duplicate files report.  It includes the following sub reports:
• A shared files report indicating which projects include each shared file.
• A potential-duplicate files report indicating which projects include each presumed duplicate file.
• A projects list sorted topologically with LOC counts for each project where shared and potential-duplicate files are counted only in the first project they occur.

• Graphical Interface Status Information
  The VBUC 3.0 graphical user interface shows detailed information for each project.  It shows sizes, progress and status by project and by source file detail.
  It helps the user to understand the volume of work required for each project and its current upgrade progress as well as to identify any eventual pieces of code that may have not been fully converted.
• EWIs and Upgrade Report Improvements
  Several modification have been implemented to the upgrade messages generated by VBUC into the generated code.
• UpgradeReport Synchronization: for previous versions of VBUC the UpgradeReport didn't show properly all the EWIs generated into the upgraded code.  For VBUC 3.0 this report includes all the EWIs generated in the converted code plus the global EWIs that are not included into the target source code.
  In addition, the accumulated counts per section where also improved to show the correct amount of occurrences.
• Links to Online Documentation: Hiperlinks are added for each EWI to its corresponding online documentation in the new www.vbtonet.com site.
• Restructuring: The EWI message structure was modified to show the numeric code first.  Also some messages where improved and some EWIs were removed or merged.
• Increased Robustness and Logging
  Several actions were taken to handle and recover from unexpected situations.  In the event that any exceptional situation may arise, an window is displayed explaining the issue and providing the user with options to generate debugging information that can be sent to ArtinSoft support for diagnosis and recommendations.

• Developer and Enterprise Editions
  The second version of VBUC Developer Edition is released with VBUC 3.0.  The development process has been formalized to syncronize the maintenance and releases of both versions.  The Developer Edition includes an improved activation and licensing model as well as an easier on-line sale mechanism.
• Trial Licenses
  Both Developer and Enterprise editions support trial licenses.  Developer trials are now available for download in the Artinsoft web site.
• ASP Upgrade Engine Integration
  The ASP Upgrade Engine has been integrated into the VBUC 3.0.  It is now installed together with VBUC.  The license file can still restrict the use of ASP upgrade abilities though.

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.

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 .

I don't speak the language but I performed the translation with Google Translations and I am reproducing it here (with some translation edits) as it shows the momentum in northern Europe.

Enjoy!

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

VB6 is a dead herring. Microsoft is waving goodbye to the old version of Visual Basic which is not compatible with its successor, Visual Studio. Net. It was necessary to upgrade Visual Basic in a number of areas to get the language to fit together with the driving environment that is the whole family of .Net languages.

This means that many companies are faced with hair in the mailbox and tons of VB6 code to deal with. Artinsoft, based in Costa Rica, has developed a tool which can translate VB6 to VB.Net and C #. It is very much C # that customers are interested in translating to tells Artinsoft’s director Roberto Leitón Garro, who is in Denmark to talk to the partner Avanade.

“In the next three to five years, there are 24 billion lines of code to be moved. It gives you an idea about how much VB6 is out there”, says Roberto Leitón Garro. Artinsoft’s tool adapts to customer needs. This is due to the problems of translating VB6 code especially coming from third party components which do not necessarily have a counterpart in the .Net world.

Another customer desire is the ability to get the code to meet specific requirements about design policies. Such policies exist in many large companies and are very specific to each one of them.

Artificial intelligence translator

Artinsoft can translate between 90 to 95 percent of the source code, measured in code lines, automatically.

It can be enhanced by organizing tool-specific code bases, and it does this by adding rules to the tool that works by using artificial intelligence to try to recognize patterns in the code. That is what is called a "semantic translator."

There is no runtime code to be used to run the translated code, and this releases customers from paying additional licensing costs.

ArtinSoft even translated internal VB6 applications for Microsoft itself and it has translated over five million lines of code for the banking company Citigroup.

ArtinSoft also stands behind the "upgrade wizard" included with Visual Studio, Microsoft's all-purpose tool.

The automatic translator machine can handle millions of lines in a few days, but the whole translation process is very similar to many other software projects.

The first phase is to look VB6 program after the seams. Then let partner Avanade take a closer at the code, and then grind code base through the translator. This will give you a new code base that requires manual fixes to finish the translation and get the code to compile. Finally test the program in the same manner as all other software products.

But despite the extensive process there is still money to be saved when translating, in relation to write the program from scratch. According to Roberto Leitón Garro it costs five times more to start over, and there are time saving of the same magnitude.

The partner firm Avanades comments that there is no real interest from customer in moving their business logic to other architectures such as. web applications or SOA solutions. Customers are happy with the PC-based programs as they are.

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

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.

--

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.

--

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.

How did ArtinSoft got into producing Aggiorno (www.aggiorno.com )?  Well after more than 15 years in the software migration market we learned a few things and we are convinced that developers want to increase their productivity and that automatic programming is a very good mean to do just that.

Aggiorno is the latest incarnation of ArtinSoft proven automatic source code manipulation techniques.  This time their are aimed at web developers.

Aggiorno, in its first release, offers a set of key automated improvements for web pages:

- Search engine indexing optimization
- User accessibility
- Error free, web standards compliance
- Cascading Style Sheet standard styling
- Site content and design separation

Aggiorno's unique value proposition is the encapsulation of source code improvements, utterly focused on web developer productivity in order to quickly and easily extend business reach.

At Microsoft TechEd in Orlando this tuesday June 3rd 2008 we announced the availability of Beta2 and we have included all the suggestion from our Beta1.

Download the Aggiorno Beta2 now and let us know what you think.

Aggiorno is an add-in for Visual Studio 2005/2008 that can swallow horrible non-validating markup and help you make an ASP.NET site web standards compliant with little effort.  With Aggiorno web developers can improve their ASP.NET or HTML sites by making them comply with the latest web standards and incorporating the latest technology trends. This will immediately mean increased productivity and immediate business value.

Beta 1 has just been released, so you might want to give it a try and send some suggestions to the development team.

Here is an excerpt from an article that Greg DeMichillie wrote on Directions on Microsoft April Edition:

"The planned follow-on release to Windows Vista, code-named Windows 7, will not include the Visual Basic 6.0 (VB 6) runtime libraries, Microsoft has begun informing customers. This sets a timeframe for the final end of support for the runtime."

As we have informed on several occasion in this Blog, Microsoft is performing all the normal steps to retire a technology from market.  Visual Basic 6 was/is a tremendously popular technology but never the less it will have to go away.

Jarvis Coffin once said: "All technologies fade away, but they don’t die."  This is most probably what is going to happen to VB6 (hey.. we still have COBOL code written more than 30 years ago that is alive and kicking!!!) but the question I have for you is: will you embrace the new technology?  Or will you fade away with it?

It is time to upgrade your skills as a developer and also to migrate your application to greener grounds. 

ArtinSoft has been hugely successful at migrating customers as Eric Nelson (Microsoft UK DPE and blogger) recently mentioned: "Artinsoft have a lot of VB6 migration experience and can help you do the migration - either by licensing their VB Upgrade Companion or by taking advantage of their migration services. Artinsoft are doing some great work with some of my UK ISVs helping them move off VB6."

If you have any questions or comments regarding your migration strategy let's cover them in this blog.

UPDATE March 11th 2009: The title of this post was: "VB Runtime NOT in next Windows".  However,  Microsoft has recently updated the support policy for Visual Basic 6 Runtime.  The new policy states that the VB runtime is now supported for the full lifecycle of Windows 7. 

PS: You can read the inflammatory comments I got over the past week below!

The date has arrived Visual Basic 6 leaves Extended support today.

Rob Helm recently wrote on "Directions on Microsoft": "Some organizations will let support lapse on the VB6 development environment, gambling that any serious problems in the VB6 environment has already been discovered"  Additionally, Rob adds: "... organizations remaining loyal to VB6 applications will have to make increasingly heroic efforts to keep those applications running as their IT environments change."

Organizations that GAMBLE with their business continuity, IT professionals that need to make HEROIC efforts to keep applications running!  Don't you believe that maintaining an IT organization supporting a business is already enough of an effort to add to the mix unsupported applications?

Do you plan to be a GAMBLING HERO or is it about time to consider ways out of Visual Basic 6?

Well this might be just the right time.  ArtinSoft is about to release a new version of the Visual Basic Upgrade companion. The effort required to migrate has been reduced even further and it now makes more sense than ever to automatically upgrade your applications to C# or VB.NET.

Have you been procrastinating the decision to move?  Act now!!

Happy 2008!

During last year, ArtinSoft has also been working on a new product that we called Aggiorno ( www.aggiorno.com ).  Aggiorno is a Visual Studio add-in designed to increase the productivity of web developers.  Aggiorno helps developers with a broad range of topics like web standards, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Accessibility, XHTML, ASP.NET, etc.

If you want to know more about aggiorno you can visit our new web site or the official blog: www.aggiorno.com\blog .

 In this blog, I will continue to discuss Visual Basic Upgrades and its implications.  By the way, customers are increasingly getting more excited about the speed and safety of migrations vs rewrites.

Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft, recently answered the question "Do the new releases of the Microsoft platform have an impact on the issue of upgrading applications from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET?" with the quote that is the title of this post.

He said that the new platform updates really do not have an impact and that you should not wait any longer to move. He emphasized that after the end of support date for VB6 the support will only be through a special support contract with Microsoft that typically is "very onerous" and increasing every year.

Additionally, Rob Helm mentioned something that I had not noticed. Did you know the name of Visual Basic .NET is now officially only "Visual Basic"? Definetely another sign pointing at the future!