Jose Aguilar's Blog

VBUC 2.0 Feature Spotlight: Migration Profiles

2008-04-08T14:39:00Z

One of the new features of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion version 2.0 is the support for Migration Profiles. These profiles give you control over which translations to use for a particular migration, improving the quality of the generated code and applying only the conversions desired (for example, for specific third party components). ...(read more)

Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 2.0 - The tool you have been waiting for

2008-04-07T22:25:00Z

The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion version 2.0 was released today! The VBUC2.0 is a considerable improvement over previous versions of the Companion....(read more)

So Long VB6, and Thanks for all the Fish

2008-04-07T18:41:00Z

I may be a little late to the obituary, but VB6 support is finally, officially, irrefutably gone. The IDE, as stated in Microsoft's Product Life-Cycle guidelines, "... will no longer be supported starting March 2008". We will miss you VB6......(read more)

Upcoming VB Webcasts

2008-03-05T15:42:00Z

Beth Massi, Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team, will be doing a series of webcasts on Visual Basic 9. They will be mostly about the new features of VB9, including one about LINQ in VB that I am particularly interested in. Another one of them deals specifically with Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET migrations, called Live From Redmond: Migrating Your Visual Basic 6 Investments to .NET. If you haven't yet considered moving your VB6 application to the .NET Framework, this may be a good place to start....(read more)

Upgrade a VB6 Application Incrementally: The Interop Forms Toolkit

2008-03-03T11:19:00Z

If you're still waiting to upgrade your VB6 applications to the .NET Framework, maybe the Interop Toolkit will help you to make a decision and get started with the process....(read more)

Killing open Terminal Services sessions remotely

2008-02-29T17:22:00Z

How to use two relatively obscure command line tools to remotely close a Terminal Services session....(read more)

Windows Server 2008 released

2008-02-28T16:54:00Z

A quick post to tell everyone that the day finally came: Windows Server 2008 was released today. it includes two technologies in particular that I think will be revolutionary: Hyper-V and RemoteApp....(read more)

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

2008-01-31T01:29:00Z

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 ...(read more)

Countdown to Extinction

2008-01-25T14:32:00Z

.... 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....(read more)

Hyper-V Beta is out!

2007-12-14T19:05:00Z

For those of you who missed it, Windows Server 2008 RC1 was released yesterday, with the Beta of Hyper-V. Finally! You can download it here , and there is some more information on the Virtual PC Guy's WebLog ....(read more)

Doing business in Latin America

2007-12-06T17:05:00Z

A couple of cultural differences of doing business in Latin America, specifically in Mexico, and the rest of the world....(read more)

Quoted by El Financiero on an article about moving to 64-bits

2007-08-30T21:45:00Z

Some time ago I was interviewed (via email) by El Financiero , a weekly business-oriented newspaper from Costa Rica, regarding 64–bit technologies. A small quote from the interview was published a couple of weeks ago, along with some information I gave them on the advantages of moving to 64–bits. The technical journalist from the newspaper did an article on how the Costa Rican Central Bank, BCCR, is moving their payments system (SINPE) from 32–bit to 64–bit servers, and the benefits they are getting...(read more)

The importance of the Ready analysis

2007-08-29T21:57:00Z

A large percentage of the work I do here at ArtinSoft is related to what we call Ready programs. The Ready program is part of the Ready-Set-Go methodology – a migration project methodology developed here at ArtinSoft that has given us great results. The Ready assessment program, or Ready , is the first stage of this methodology. As you are probably aware, the more planning you put into a project, the higher the probability that the project will be succesful. Well, with the Ready, we do a an in-depth...(read more)

I/O x86 Virtualization at last!

2007-08-28T17:54:00Z

Ever since we started working on the Virtual Server seminars, we’ve been hearing about I/O Virtualization, and how it will improve the virtualization landscape as the VT instructions did. Well, today Intel unveiled its vPro platform, with this new technology. The technology is called Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O or VT-d. VT-d controls access from Virtual Machines to memory at the physical page level, preventing one VM from accessing other VM’s memory. This has the side effect of virtualizing...(read more)

MS Virtualization has a new home

2007-08-21T17:33:00Z

In case you missed it, Microsoft recently unveiled a new Virtualization Website . This website centralizes the information about all of Microsoft’s virtualization products. I especially like the page about the different Virtualization Solutions offered by the company. It also caught my attention that they now have Softgrid application virtualization fully integrated with the virtualization stack....(read more)