Yesterday TechNewsWorld published an article called Planning a Migration Route From Visual Basic 6 to .Net, which discusses some aspects of a report by the Aberdeen Group. The article contains lots of valuable information for those of you considering moving your VB6.0 applications to .NET, by giving a very good idea on the best practices performed by the “Best-in-Class” organizations. I wanted to touch briefly on some of the points from the article, and how it matches our experience helping Fortune/Global 1000 companies upgrade their applications to the latest technology.

Something that is consistent with what we’ve seen is that 33% of the respondents from Best-in-Class and 15% of the “All Others” organizations engage a third party to assist with the migration. We at ArtinSoft, with our Consulting Services group, and along with our world-wide partners, have seen this as a growing trend, and have accumulated a vast a mount of experience that can be leveraged by these organizations to move away from legacy environments.

Also, as part of our migration methodology, we promote a controlled process that first brings your VB6.0 application up to Functional Equivalence in .NET, and then you can use this as a base to enhance an improve your investment. For many clients we also use the extensibility capabilities of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to prepare the source code for these enhancements by automating specific architectural modifications required by our customers. These modifications represent an enhancement in itself, and also leave the code ready for further changes by making sure it meets all the practices and coding standards of the organization. The Vertex Omiga and Supervisor Case Studies are a good example in this regard – and we’ve done other migrations with even more important customizations that, unfortunately, I can’t mention directly.

Finally, I want to quote the following text from near the end of the article:

“The research shows that Best-in-Class companies are six times more likely than all other companies to use code conversion or automated porting tools in order to help accelerate part of the migration process.”

You can read our case studies that show this is in fact the case, and we have helped many organizations save time and resources when performing migrations aided by using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion.