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Managing a Migration Project

A discussion on Project Management practices, applied to Migration Projects. What has worked for us at ArtinSoft, and what you should avoid when managing a Migration Project

Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, Code Advisor and Visual Basic 6.0 Upgrade Assessment Tool

Last week, a developer from a company that is evaluating a trial version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion sent us an email, asking if they should use the Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Upgrade Assessment Tool and the Code Advisor.  Perhaps someone else has a similar doubt, so I thought it may be a good idea to share our response here.

First of all, let's remember that we are talking about three separate --and different-- tools:

  • Visual Basic Upgrade Companion (VBUC): this is ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic 6.0 to VB.NET/C# migration tool.  Basically, you use this tool to convert your VB6 code to .NET.
  • Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Upgrade Assessment Tool: this tool was written for Microsoft by ArtinSoft, and can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=10c491a2-fc67-4509-bc10-60c5c039a272&DisplayLang=en.  The purpose of this tool is to generate a detailed report of the characteristics of your VB6 code, giving you an idea of the size and complexity of the code from a migration standpoint.  The tool itself does not make any modification of conversion of the source code.
  • Code Advisor: this tool is also provided by Microsoft, free of charge, and can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a656371a-b5c0-4d40-b015-0caa02634fae&displaylang=en.  The Code Advisor analyzes your VB6 source code and looks for particular migration issues within the code.  Each issue is marked with a code comment that suggests how to modify the VB6 code to avoid the problem.

The purposes of the Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Upgrade Assessment Tool and the Code Advisor are different, so it is recommended that you use both of them.  However, it is important to note that the Code Advisor was designed for users that plan to migrate with the Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard (the conversion tool that comes with Visual Studio .NET), and since VBUC has a greater migration coverage, some of the issues that will be flagged by the Code Advisor will be fixed automatically by VBUC.  For a detailed discussion on those issues, please refer to my article “Visual Basic Upgrade Companion vs. Code Advisor”: http://www.artinsoft.com/VB-Upgrade-Companion-vs-CodeAdvisor.aspx

 

Published Feb 10 2007, 05:46 AM by jpena

Comments

 

mahesh gawali said:

how can the upgrade assessment tool be used with a huge application which consists of multiple projects sharing same files, avoiding the repetitive assessment of the shared modules.

mail me on: maheshgawali@gmail.com

February 16, 2010 1:38 PM
 

Juan Peña said:

The version of the Assessment Tool that I mention in my blog post is quite old (as is the blog post itself); now we have an improved version that takes care of the shared / duplicate files scenario, and will count those files only once, avoiding a bias in the lines of code count due to shared files being counted several times.

You can download this version free of charge from our website: www.artinsoft.com/visual-basic-upgrade-assessment-tool.aspx.  It will generate output information in HTML and Excel format.

An important note on duplicate files:  some VB6 applications contain exact copies of the same file in different locations, mainly due to the lack of inheritance in VB6.  This scenario is different from what we called “shared files” (when two or more projects reference the same copy of a single file, usually placed in a centralized folder).  In this case, the Assessment Tool applies a heuristic to detect possible duplicate files, mainly due to performance reasons, which consists of comparing the file names and the numbers of lines of code.  If two files have the exact same name and number of lines, then it is marked as a potential duplicate, and in most cases it is an actual duplicate.  However, it’s recommended to use a text comparison tool in these cases to be 100% sure.  Shared files do not have this issue and will be filtered by the Assessment Tool automatically.

April 21, 2010 4:31 PM

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