Feedback from Apogeo, Italy

clock January 22, 2013 17:30

One more customer who used VB Migration Partner and Code Architects' migration services...

 

VB Migration Partner has been a winning choice for migrating our VB6 application, that serves over 700 customers. In a few months they delivered an error-free version of our 500K lines of code application and we appreciated the VB Migration Partner efficient and skilled technical support. Code Architects is a crucial partner to quickly adapt the product to the new technologies.

Gianluca Zanella
Technical Team Apogeo - Gruppo Zucchetti – Italy

 



SnelStart, Netherlands choosed VB Migration Partner and happily migrated 450K LOCs

clock August 10, 2011 09:20

We just received this great feedback:

We have investigated the possibilities for a migration after a presentation of Code Architects at the Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Berlin. Before the presentation we assumed that migration would be too complicated en too expensive. After analyzing four different tools, we chose VB Migration Partner for the migration of our accounting and billing software (450K lines of code).

The big advantage of VB Migration Partner is that it solves the problems directly in the VB6-code by using “pragmas”. Therefore we don’t have to freeze our code and interrupt the new development in our software. With VB Migration Partner it’s also possible to migrate 1:1. This enables us to offer our customers the same user experience, but this time on a new platform. The final reason for us to choose VB Migration Partner is the (online) service and documentation. The tool and the website contain lots of background information and tips that will help you with the migration.

Ivo Huizinga
IT Manager, SnelStart

Netherland-based SnelStart is just another company who has appreciated the beauty and usefulness of VB Migration Partner's innovative approach based on pragma and its advantages over previous-generation, traditional conversion tools. You can find more example in our User Feedback page.



[CASE STUDY] Xcel Energy, USA

clock February 15, 2011 11:22

Xcel Energy recently used VB Migration Partner to migrate a VB6 application consisting of multiple projects for a total of 120,000 lines of code (LOCs). The migration project was a complex one, because of many constraints and requirements, such as the adoption of Rockford Lotcha's CSLA.NET framework, but our conversion software proved to be up to its reputation. In the words of our customer:

VB Migration Partner was able to correctly parse and convert all of the Forms and ActiveX controls to VB.NET. After analyzing the output and reviewing their on-line knowledge base (which is quite extensive), two pragmas were inserted to reduce the number of conversion errors to a handful in most of the programs. All of the forms could be edited without any further intervention. Grid controls that could not be converted were initially left as red rectangles. Within 2-days, all of the source code was cleaned up with no compiler errors.  This meant that the existing presentation layer could be converted from VS6 to VS2008 – so the VB Migration Partner option works very well as part of an overall approach.

120,000 LOCs were translated to the zero-compilation-error stage in 2 days! This is pure productivity!

You can read the entire Xcel Energy case study here

 



Guess which VB6 migration tool delivers fewer compilation errors?

clock February 2, 2011 16:48

Migration from VB6 is a serious matter and choosing the wrong approach might cost you a lot of time and money, or even putting at stake the entire migration project.

For this reason we always recommend all our prospect customers to test all the available solutions and tools before making their final choise. This is the experience of Solent, France:

Facing a problem of Microsoft VB6 obsolescence, we spent weeks defining the best way to migrate our customer’s specific enterprise application from VB6 to VB.NET. We tried different COTS migration tools but the results were not the expected ones: too many things to complete manually after the conversion. The idea to develop a proprietary migration tool was in our mind when we finally found VB Migration Partner. It was the solution we needed.

Indeed, with VB Migration Partner, we ended having to manually deal with only about 100 compilation problems compared to more than 10k given by other tools. Its iterative process with replayable corrections (thanks to "pragmas") was a very useful functionality in order to reach a complete validation of the 150K lines of code application we had to migrate. During this process, we found and fixed a large number of execution problems in our application due to migration. A reactive technical support and the clear "knowledge base" on the website helped us to identify problem causes and to correct them. In only 2 months, we delivered a fully-tested and renewed .NET application to our customer.

Damien SEURU
Project Manager, SOLENT

Completing the migration of 150K LOCs in a couple months is surely a great example of the high productivity you can reach with VB Migration Partner. Likewise, having to solve just 100 compilation errors instead of 10,000 gives a very clear idea of how far ahead we are if compared to our competitors!

You can read more about our customers and their experience in our Testimonial page.



One more customer praising the convert-test-fix approach

clock January 24, 2011 16:28

We received from a German customer these notes, which we gladly (and proudly) publish. As usual, boldface is mine:

On today’s market you have to be able to deliver new application versions at any time. Customers don’t accept statements like: “Sorry, we are in a migration process. We can’t add the feature you need. We can’t even fix a bug within the next year.” VB Migration Partner is the only tool which enables us to enhance the application during the migration process.

It was soon clear to us that the library approach is the way to go. VB6 and VB.NET are too different. It’s not possible for a machine to close this gap. Without VB Migration Partner we would have ended up implementing our own library. The "pragma" concept enables us to run the migration and as a result get .NET code we can compile. With pragmas migration is an ongoing process. We migrate, make changes on the generated code, express these changes in terms of "pragmas" and migrate again. During these migration cycles we are still able to change, enhance and deliver the old VB6 application. VB Migration Partner is a software which gives you the feeling the developers work with it themselves. They know the problems in migration processes and they offer solutions that work.

Conclusion: If you have unlimited time, money and manpower it might be worth having a closer look on the VS built in migration tool. If one of these resources is limited you choose VB Migration Partner.

Martin Gerhold
Dietrich’s AG / Germany

Some customers ask us whether it is feasible to migrate to .NET without a support library. This customer found the answer by himself: the support library is the only reasonable mean to automatically deliver code that runs correctly. In fact, he says that without VB Migration Partner they would end up building their own library. Fortunately we at Code Architects have spent many man/years to extend and fine-tune our library, thus you can focus on less boring facets of the business.

Equally interesting is that this customer realized that only VB Migration Partner is able to convert VB6 apps that are being modified during the process: this is the methodology we know as “convert-test-fix”. All other conversion tool work on a snapshot of the VB6 codebase, and when the migration seems to be completed you suddenly realize that you still have to re-sync your migrated code with the new features and bug fixes that have been added to the original VB6 code in the meantime.

Not really smart, uh?...but this is how all other VB6 conversion tools work.Wink

You can read more comments from actual VB Migration Partner users in our Testimonials page.



Deliver error-free migrated apps faster with Trace-Match

clock October 8, 2010 13:45

We are very proud to announce that a new great feature will be introduced in forthcoming version 1.32.

Trace-Match is both a technical feature and a methodology to generate functional equivalent .NET application in less time and with less effort.

In a nutshell, from a technical perspective Trace-Match is the combination of the following elements:

  • a VB6 trace library (VB6TraceLib.dll) that allows you to determine what method is entered/exited, the value of your variables, the contents of controls, etc. It can send output to file or to any utility that can display debug data (e.g. SysInternal's DebugView utility), profile your code, and more. It even works correctly if a method is abruptly exited if an unhandled error occurs. You need to install this library only on the computer where you do your migrations.
  • a .NET trace library that works in the same way as the VB6 library. These .NET classes have been included in our main support library, therefore there is no need to distribute an additional DLL to your customers. As with the VB6 library, you can easily enable or disable tracing as it is more convenient for you.
  • two new commands in VB Migration Partner, which allow you to quickly insert and remove trace statements in any VB6 project or project group.

Trace-Match gives you two priceless benefits:

Full functional equivalence: by comparing the trace files produced by the original VB6 program and the migrated .NET application, you can have an "objective" evidence that the latter is 100% functionally equivalent to the original VB6 code. All you have to do is running a set of test cases against the VB6 and .NET executables, and using a file Diff utility such as WinMerge to verify that the trace files are identical.

Integrated debug features: if the converted .NET is being used by your customers or your collegues, you might want to leave trace enabled, so that you can easily see what went wrong if they notice a malfunctioning. If everything works fine, we even provide you with a simple Visual Studio macro that can remove all the trace statements from the .NET project.

We developed the Trace-Match methodology for internal use some time ago, and since them we have successfully used it to migrate many VB6 applications for our customers. By making Trace-Match available to all VB Migration Partner users, we are sure their productivity will dramatically increase. Read our whitepaper to learn more.

... and yes, you aren't going to find this great feature in any other VB6 conversion tool on the market! Cool



Two migration e-books all serious developers should read

clock September 17, 2010 10:51

In our quest to provide useful info to our users and readers, we periodically surf the Internet looking for articles, books, whitepapers, tools, etc. related to VB6 to .NET migration.

This week the search has been quite fruitful, and we have added two great items to our Articles page:

Navigating your way through Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic.NET Application Upgrades
This 62-page e-book is one of the best collection of problems & solutions you can find on the Internet, with tons of detailed examples and code samples. It is obviously based on first-hand experience of the author with Microsoft Upgrade Wizard, and the solutions he proposes are valid and functional.

Visual Basic .NET Enhancements Compared to Visual Basic 6.
This e-book focuses on many differences between VB6 and VB.NET and in many cases it goes much deeper than the other articles mentioned in this page. It’s not the best place to start from when learning VB.NET, but it’s surely a must-read for the serious developer facing a complex migration project. (148 pages).

Both e-books are by David Ross Goben and are written in a clear and bright style. A must-read for all serious VB6 and VB.NET developers.

NOTE: Interestingly, virtually all the issues that David found when migrating his VB6 apps are handled automatically by our VB Migration Partner. (More on this in a subsequente post.)



ADOLibrary is in semi-public beta!

clock August 10, 2010 13:03

After many months of internal beta testing, last week we released our revolutionary ADOLibrary to selected customers.

As you may remember from a previous post, Code Architects' ADOLibrary offers effortless migration from ADODB to ADO.NET. Basically, ADOLibrary is a set of ADO.NET-based classes that expose an ADODB-like object model. For example, the ADOConnection object has the same programming interface as ADODB.Connection and behaves much like the same; the ADORecordset class works like the ADODB.Recordset class, and so on. ADOLibrary currently supports all ADODB classes, with the only exception of the Record class. It is important to emphasize that ADOLibrary is fully ADO.NET and has no dependency on ADODB or other COM technologies.

ADOLibrary currently supports the vast majority of ADODB features, including forwardonly-readonly rowsets, optimistic batch updates, parameterized commands and stored procedures, the Filter property for client-side recordsets. If accessing Microosft SQL Server, keysets and dynamic server-side cursors are also supported. ADOLibrary event supports most ADODB dynamic properties, such as Update Criteria and Unique Table.

Actually, it's easier to list what ADOLibrary does *not*currently support, namely hierarchical recordset, the Record object, and multiple, semicolon-separated commands in the Execute method (they are fine in the Recordset.Open method, though).

The whole ADOLibrary documentation is already available online. This is a draft version and lacks some code samples, but it is already enough exhaustive to be usable.

 



The kind of user feedback we are fond of...

clock February 23, 2010 03:55

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
 

I was especially pleasured with it not just because our customer choosed VB Migration Partner after comparing with other VB6 migration tools that have been on the market for years, but also because it demonstrates that, in spite of all its power VB Migration Partner is as easy-to-use as it can possibly be.

 



[CASE STUDY] SIS-Evolution becomes official Microsoft Corp case study

clock December 14, 2009 03:42

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.