We just received a very nice comment from our customer, and I couldn't help quoting it:

I must say at this point I am incredibly impressed with the software, tried other products and got a half baked application that ran in loops.  With VB Migration Partner I had a running prototype the same day.  This is the best spent money we have ever experienced.  Thanks and good luck with the product.

Jeremy Pethick
Mazeppa AS 

The most recent beta - more precisely, a release candidate - of Visual Studio 2010 has been released only a few days ago, yet VB Migration Partner already supports VB.NET 2010!

Support for VS2010 isn't the only great new feature in VB Migration Partner v. 1.30. For example, you can now generate more detailed batch reports, that contain all the main project metrics (in addition to migration warnings and compilation errors, as it happened in previous versions). We also support Shape controls with rounded corners and have refined the algorithm used to draw lines whose BorderWidth is greater than 1.

And as usual we have fixed a number of minor bugs, as reported from our customers, especially in the file I/O area. Converted VB.NET apps are now even more compatible with existing VB6 programs, and in fact they can share text and binary files with each other.

As usual, registered customers can download the new 1.30 release by means of the command in the Help menu.

The title says it all.

You can read this month's issue of MSDN Flash Extras here:

One of the most powerful weapons to win the migration war is to produce significant and detailed reports both before and after the migration.

You need good reports before you even start the migration process to plan your effort, size your team, and provided a reasonable set of deadlines. You need them after you run the conversion software on a given VB6 project because you need to estimate the time needed to fix each individual compilation error and migration warning.

VB Migration Partner is quite versatile on the report side. In fact, it generates as many as seven different types of reports, including:

• Migration issues and warnings – can be sorted by location or warning number
• List of compilation errors - VB Migration Partner can automatically compile the generated VB.NET and display the compiler’s results inside the VB Migration Partner’s IDE
• Assessment report – in the form of a customizable Excel spreadsheet that allows you to estimate the time and money needed to fix all migration warnings.
• Code metrics – with information such as the size of each project/file, number of forms/controls, percentage of remarks, down to more sophisticated stats such as cyclomatic index (which gives you a measure of how long it takes to test the migrated code)
• XML report – list of migration warnings and compilation errors in XML format, which is then easily imported in external program for further analysis, converted to HTML using a custom format, and so forth.

For a thorough description of each report, please read our “Migrating a VB6 application in 10 easy steps” whitepaper.

We are aware that the value of reports is even greater to companies who offer migration services based on our VB Migration Partner, because a comprehensive report is essential to prepare a detailed offer for the end user. For example, XML reports can be run in batch mode over all the VBP projects that make up an application. One of our largest customers is migrating an application with 1200+ projects, thus this report is a real lifesaver.

The beauty of XML reports is that they are produced by means of an extender DLL, written in plain VB.NET and whose source code is freely available to all registered users. Unlike other VB6 migration tools which are based on proprietary languages, VB Migration Partner can be easily extended by any .NET developer. This feature allows any developer to easily create custom reports that contain exactly the information they need.

Recently, one of our customers asked to extend XML reports to include code metrics and thus provide a mix of the last two report types outlined above. Well, it took less than one hour to tweak the extender’s source code and have the job done. This is what we mean by ease of customization.

We have just released VB Migration Partner v. 1.22. In addition to fixing a few minor problems with several controls - including the PictureBox, CommonDialog, and ListBox controls - this new releases further improves the VB6Variant class (which now behaves closer and closer to the original VB6 Variant type) and the support for DBCS character sets (Japanese users take note).

The portion of the translation engine has been improved and omit to generates many unnecessary warnings. More specifically, all previous versions of VB Migration Partner emit the 0354 warning when assigning a Variant or Object variable to a scalar variable, as in this example:

   Dim source As Object
   Dim dest As Integer
   ' some statements here

   ' ...

   ' UPGRADE_WARNING #0354: Unable to read default member of symbol 'source'. Consider using the GetDefaultMember6 helper method."
   dest = source

Starting with version 1.22, if source is a Variant variable, VB Migration Partner uses a more sophisticated algorithm and checks whether the variable is ever the target of an assignment by means of a Set keyword. If it isn't the case, then VB Migration Partner omits the 0354 warning, because the source variable can only contain a scalar value and the GetDefaultMember6 helper method is never necessary. This smart behavior dramatically decreases the number of generated warnings that you have to carefully check to ensure that the VB.NET version behaves like the original VB6 code. In a medium-sized migration project, this feature alone can save you one or two days of review work.

As usual, registered users will be alerted that a new version is available the next time they fire up VB Migration Partner.

I am very glad and proud to announce that Microsoft Corp just published a world-wide case study based on the successful SIS-EVOLUTION migration project, of course based on VB Migration Partner.

The migration was carried out by SIS, an Austrian software company who converted a mission-critical Visual Basic 6 application counting 950,000 lines of code (LOCs) in about 9 months. It is noteworthy that the total effort included software selection, code review and refactoring tasks that weren't directly related to the actual migration stage.

It is interesting what SIS found during the software selection stage and the reason why they chose VB Migration Partner:

SIS evaluated six products before choosing VB Migration Partner. To ensure an auto-mated migration to the greatest possible extent, SIS conducted an inventory of the existing code base, identified critical and “difficult” functions, and identified 25,000 lines of code to run through each con-version tool. “It took 2.5 hours to get a project that would compile and run using VB Migration Partner, and 13 hours with the closest competitor,” says Wiegele. “VB Migration Partner also required 50 percent less rework to precisely duplicate the UI of the old application.

Thanks to VB Migration Partner, each of the three developers working on the project was able to correctly migrate around 50K LOCs per month, a number that confirms VB Migration Partner as the most productive and cost-effective VB6 conversion tool on the market.

This excerpt has to do with Code Architects' tech support:

While VB Migration Partner can be customized for even greater levels of efficiency, it’s noteworthy that SIS achieved its results using a standard, noncustomized copy of our software,” says Francesco Balena, Chief Executive Officer at Code Architects. “Thanks to our extensive online documentation and knowledge base, the only technical support SIS required was handled through a half-dozen e-mails.

Here's one more quote from SIS's Otto Wiegele, which emphasizes that VB Migration Partner's ability to closely reproduce the VB6 user interface saved the customer a lot of time and money, because no retraining was necessary:

SIS was able to ensure that all Visual Basic–related methods and controls work identically in the new application. VB Migration Partner prevented the incidental intro-duction of subtle differences in the application’s look and feel, enabling the client to minimize retraining of the system’s 350 users.

You can read the entire case study here.

We have just published a new whitepaper:

Support library and code maintainability
In addition to providing 100% functional equivalence with the original VB6 code, VB Migration Partner’s extensive support library is the key for generating code that is readable and easily maintainable. This whitepaper busts a few false myths about support libraries by comparing the concise source code that VB Migration Partner generates with the code produced by other tools that don’t rely on an equally extensive library.

Happy reading!