Yesterday we added three new samples to our code samples section:

Virtual Night Sky shows how the sky appears at the specified place and time, and provides info on stars under the mouse cursor.
Barcode Generator displays Bar Codes 39 and 128 and lets you copy them to clipboard and save to file.
Grid-Net Waves 3D animates a 3D graph.

What they have in common is that they display graphic output using a combination of VB6 and API methods. VB Migration Partner fully supports both techniques and converts these samples with little or no effort (in all cases you need pragmas to release the device context handle).

I especially like the Virtual Night Sky sample: it took me just two convert-test-fix cycles to have a fully working version, and the entire process took me less than five minutes! I didn't even had to study the source code to understand how it works: the entire process was quite "mechanical", in the sense that I run the VB6 code through the tool a first time to see which compilation errors I got. I added a few pragmas and got a zero-compilation and zero-runtime error VB.NET code, which worked at the first attempt. If only all VB6 applications could be converted so simply!

BTW, this sample showed an interesting (and undocumented, of course) difference between the PictureBox control in VB6 and VB.NET. The original VB6 application allows you to use the Shift+left and Shift+right key combinations to move your point of view on the horizon. Oddly, these key combinations aren't trapped by the VB.NET PictureBox control: instead, they are translated to the Tab and Shift-Tab sequences. In other words, they move the input focus to a different control on the form. We decided NOT to replicate this minor difference in VB Migration Partner's support library: instead, we changed the converted app to use the Alt+left and Alt+right key combinations to achieve the same result. Spotting and fixing this issue took me five more minutes, but I can now explore my night sky with a fully .NET application. 

Note to Beta Testers: if you migrate these three samples with current version 0.92 you'll need to manually fix a few VB.NET statements. These fixes won't be necessary with the upcoming version 0.93.