On Wednesday, September 10, 1:45 p.m. I'll speak at VSLive! New York and give a session entitled "Tricks, Traps, and Techniques in Migrating VB6 Applications to .NET" . Here's the session abstract:
Six years after Microsoft
launched the .NET Framework there are just too many VB6 business
applications waiting to be ported to the .NET world. Given the
limitations of the Upgrade Wizard, not surprisingly many software shops
decided to go through the long and costly process of rewriting their
applications from scratch or – much more frequently – just to stay with
VB6. Unfortunately, some 3rd party ActiveX controls don’t work well
under Microsoft Vista and Microsoft has officially discontinued tech
support for VB6 in March 2008. This has made upgrading to .NET the only
option for VB6 legacy apps.
In
this session we’ll briefly list the most important issues you have to
face when migrating your VB6 code to VB.NET and how you can solve them.
We’ll briefly cover all the most evident differences between the two
languages – data types, arrays, structures, error handling, and so
forth – and then dig under the surface to reveal many undocumented
details, for example how string immutability and orphaned delegates can
make your converted VB.NET code fail. We will also illustrate many
examples of how you can use a support library to shorten the distance
between VB6 and VB.NET and reduce the time you spend testing the
converted code, how to work with arrays with non-zero lower bound, how
to simulate control arrays, how to use regexes to fix common problems
in the migration process, and much more. Attendees will receive the
source code of a support library that implements all the techniques
discussed in the session (a trimmed down version of a commercial
support library used in real-world migration projects).
if you happen to be attending VSLive!, you're welcome...