So, What's New in the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion version 2.2?

11. December 2008 12:09 by Jaguilar in General  //  Tags: , , , ,   //   Comments (0)

As I mention in a post last week, we recently released version 2.2 of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion. The previous version, 2.1, added some new things, but focused mostly on "under the covers" improvements, and fixing several issues reported with version 2.0. However, for this release, we do have several exciting new features that should make migrations from Visual Basic 6.0 go much smoother. Among these, we can mention:

Custom Mappings
The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion enables the user to define customized transformations for the upgrade process execution. This technique allows to implement coverage for non-supported legacy components and to enhance and fine-tune the existing support. I already covered Custom Maps on this post and you can read more about this on the Custom Maps page.

Data access - new flavors available
The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion converts the data access model on your VB6 application (ADO, DAO, RDO) to ADO.NET, using the either SQLClient data provider or the classes defined in the System.Data.Common namespace. Using the latter will allow your migrated application to connect with most major .NET database providers. Version 2.2 added support for the automated migration of DAO and RDO to ADO.NET, and greatly improved the migration of ADO to ADO.NET. More information here.

Naming conventions refactoring
This  feature  lets  the  end-user  migrate  his  Visual  Basic  6  code  to  VB.NET  or  C#  with  standard Naming Conventions.  This  feature  is  a compound of common naming conventions for .NET languages, and use  standard  coding  practices for  C# and VB.NET. You can find more information on this and the next feature in this page.

Renaming mechanism
The  renaming  feature changes  the name of an  identifier and all of  its  references  in order  to avoid conflicts with another name. Some of the conflicts solved by the VBUC are:

  • Keywords: The VBUC must rename the names that are the same as keywords from Visual Basic .NET and C#. Moreover,  the  VBUC  should  take  into  account  the  target  language  (Visual  Basic.NET  or  C#)  to recognize the keywords that apply for each case.
  • Case sensitive issues (C#): Visual  Basic  6  is  a  case  insensitive  language,  but  C#  is  not.  The  VBUC must  correct  the  name references used with different cases to the case used in the declaration.
  • Scope conflict: This is necessary when a Type declaration element has the same name as the type declaration. If  this case  is detected  the element declaration must be  renamed along with  the  references  to  this type element.
  • Conflicts with .NET classes: This section applies for Forms and UserControls, mainly, because they could declare some member names that are part of the corresponding class in .NET (in this case System.Windows.Forms.Form & System.Windows.Forms.UserControl).  These  members  must  be  renamed  in  order  to  avoid  any conflict.

User Controls and Custom Properties
In Visual Basic 6.0  user  controls  expose  their  programmer-defined  properties  in  the  property  list  on  the designer window. These user properties can be configured to be displayed in a specific category and based on  these settings. The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion can determine  the most appropriate type  and  settings  for  the  resulting  properties  to  have  functional  equivalence with  the  original VB6 user property. I plan on elaborating on this feature in a future blog post.

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