January 2008 - Posts

• Opening Projects Migrated with the VB Upgrade Companion on Visual Studio 2008

  Now that Visual Studio 2008 is available, you might wonder what will happen with the Visual Studio 2005 projects generated with the current version of the VB Upgrade Companion (VBUC). For starters, it is worth mentioning that Visual Studio 2008 fully supports projects created in the .NET Framework 2.0, like the ones generated with the VBUC. The newer version of the .NET Framework (3.0, shipped with Vista, and 3.5, shipped with VS2008) keep the same core version of the CLR (2.0) as before, with very few minor changes. There are no compatibility or breaking changes like when upgrading from versions 1.1 to 2.0 of the .NET Framework. When you open a VS2005 project in VS2008, you are greeted with the new Visual Studio Conversion Wizard: Once you click Next, you can select whether to create a backup of the project or not. I chose to NOT create a backup, since this is a copy of the project, since I will be comparing both .csproj files later on. Press Next. The next step tells you what will happen during the conversion: Press Finish, and after a little while, the process will be complete: You can check out the Conversion Report afterwards. For most projects, however, the reports should be in blank: So there you have it. After converting this test VS2005 Windows Form application, I was able to continue working on it without any issues. It is true that the code generated by the VBUC will not take advantage of all the neat features of the .NET Framework 3.5, such as WPF, but you should be able to continue working with the migrated code after moving to Visual Studio 2008 without any problems. Posted Jan 31 2008, 01:29 AM by Jaguilar with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard, Tools, Visual Studio 2008, VBUC

• Countdown to Extinction

  .... and so we reached 2008. This may seem like any other "average" year - the price of gas keeps going up, everybody talks about global warming, and will be an election year in the US (so we have one more reason to stop watching TV). However, for a large group of IT departments around the world, 2008 is a BIG year. 2008 is the year when Microsoft officially kills support for Visual Basic 6.0. It took a while, but as in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, everybody knew it was coming. Microsoft's Product Family Life-Cycle Guidelines for Visual Basic 6.0 details the different support stages VB has gone through: ... Mainstream Phase The Mainstream phase will be in effect for six years after the product's general availability date. Visual Basic 6.0 was generally available in January 1999. Mainstream support will end March 31, 2005. Extended Phase The Extended phase will be in effect from seven to nine years after the product's general availability date. Extended Phase support begins in April 2005 and ends March 2008. Non-Supported Phase Visual Basic 6.0 will no longer be supported starting March 2008. If you are still using Visual Basic 6.0, however, there is no need to despair. According to the Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows Vista, the VB6 runtime will be supported in Vista for at least 10 more years (5 of mainstream support + 5 of extended support). The IDE, however, will be unsupported from April 8, 2008. And you will be missing all the new technology shipping with the .NET development tools - web services, WPF, managed code, etc. There is, however, an easier way to move away from VB6 quickly... You can use the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to move your application quickly and effectively from VB6 to either Visual Basic .NET or C#. Our experience in migration projects shows that by using the VBUC, you can drastically reduce the time it takes to move your application to the .NET Framework, reducing the risk vs. a complete rewrite, and keeping all your business rules, but in a modern platform that will allow you to use the latest technologies moving forward. You can find more information on the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion here. Posted Jan 25 2008, 02:32 PM by Jaguilar with no comments Filed under: News, Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard