While we are still busy on release 0.97, I want to let you know in advance what we working on.

First and foremost, VB Migration Partner now supports both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. You have to change a line in the beta's configuration file to enable VB2008 support, but it won't be necessary with the "real" product, because we plan to deliver two distinct versions of release 1.0, each one generating different flavors of Visual Basic projects.

Another great new feature is the support for batch migrations: you can run VB Migration Partner via a command-line tool and integrate it in your build process. If your application consists of dozens of separate projects, this feature can save you a lot of time and efforts. Even if you don't use a build process, you can automate the re-migration of the entire application by means of a plain batch file. 

We have added a tab to the Tools-Options dialog box, where you can select a default output folder for converted projects. Not really an amazing feature, yet something that is quite handy when converting a multiple-project application.

Another simple but useful feature: project GUIDs are preserved when re-migrating a project that had been migrated previously. If you wonder why this can be useful, just imagine the following scenario. You migrate projects P1 and P2 to VB.NET (separatedly), then you launch Visual Studio 2005/2008 and create a solution S1 that gathers the two project. (Creating a single solution can be useful for debugging purposes, for example.) If you find a bug in P1 you can now re-migrate it without breaking the S1 solution, because the link between a solution and its projects depends on the project's GUID stored in the *.vbproj file. Ditto for references between projects in the same solution. It's a tiny feature but a great time saver.

Finally, we have changed the Excel template used to generate assessment estimation of time/cost of the migration process. You can now use your own formulas to define how the cost grows when the number of occurrences of a given issue grows. Thanks to this new feature you can create more reasonable migration plans.

Version 0.97 is arriving in a few days. Beta testers, stay tuned! .... and thanks for your precious support in these months.