Seven months after the launch of the http://www.vbmigration.com/ web site - and about two and a half years after we wrote a first prototype - we are excited to announce that VB Migration Partner 1.0 is finally available.

True, it took a bit longer than we expected. Our beta testers reported a few elusive bugs, that we promptly fixed, but above all they give us hints and suggestions on how to improve our tool. As a result, we added many new pragmas, support for batch migrations, optimized execution for n-tier applications, include files, advanced code analysis techniques, and much more. We now support Visual Studio 2008 and the integration with Microsoft Team System. We wanted to write the best conversion tool from VB6 and VB.NET, and we did it.

In these months VB Migration Partner has proven to be a very flexible tool, able to fit the most demanding migration needs. It is being used to migrate VB6 projects of all kinds and sizes, from graphical games to mission-critical bank and insurance software, from little utilities to "monsters" business apps that count over 10 million lines. One of our customers is using it convert an interpreter for a custom programming language.

Along the way we learned more ways to improve the quality of migrated code and expanded our knowledge base with dozens of articles, which explain how to achieve the most from this tool. The great thing about VB Migration Partner is its flexibility (provided by pragmas) and its open architecture, which allows you to be in control of how VB.NET code is generated, how to convert forms containing 3rd party controls, and more.

The "convert-test-fix" methodology has been welcome by all our customers, especially those who have large "legacy" applications to take care of, that can't simply be thrown away when the VB.NET version is ready. As a matter of fact, one of our customers is planning to keep both the VB6 and VB.NET versions in sync for at least one year, until they complete the conversion and all their users have switched to the .NET version. To ensure that the two versions are "functionally equivalent" at all times, they will use batch migration and custom-made plug-ins that leverage VB Migration Partner's extensibility model. Just another evidence of how flexible our tool is.

 

Many developers wrote us and asked about our licensing policy. Our goal was to make VB Migration Partner a viable solution for software companies of all sizes as well as individual developers and smaller software shops. As a result, we are offering VB Migration Partner in two editions:

  • VB Migration Partner Professional supports the vast majority of the features described on our Web site and can convert VB6 projects of up to 50,000 executable lines. (Empty lines and remarks aren't included in the count, but lines at the top of .frm files are.)
  • VB Migration Partner Enterprise is the full-featured version, can migrate larger VB6 projects, performs more sophisticated code analysis and refactoring, supports batch conversions and Microsoft Team System, and is the preferred choice for N-tiered applications. Users of the Enterprise Edition can purchase additional user licenses and the full source code of the support library.

UPDATE (October 8, 2010): Starting with version 1.32 we aren't offering the Professional edition any longer. The only available version is VB Migration Partner Enterprise, and therefore in most cases we are dropping the word "Enterprise" when describing our product.

Unfortunately, at this time we can't offer a demo version that is freely downloadable, but we plan to remedy in the future. If you need to test our tool against your VB6 code, let us know.

All VB Migration Partner users benefit from a 6-month subscription period, during which they are allowed to download all the releases that have produced in the meantime.

Finally, we are launching the Early Adopter Program (EAP): for a short period you can purchase VB Migration Partner and double your subscription period (one year for the Enterprise edition). Start converting your VB6 applications right now and protect your investment at the same time!

Find more information on our web site.