After 15 years of developing our application in VB3, VB4-16 bit and VB6, I was disappointed to discover that we could not move to VB.Net. Our application was too large to rewrite into the new syntax. In spite of edits made to follow the new rules, such as omitting the lower bound on Dim statements, the migration tool available ran for 5 hours and gave 1947 errors to fix; and that was just on our main application program. Using VB Migration Partner, we converted that same code to .Net in 9 minutes and had 3 compilation errors to fix, all having to do with a third-party OCX. After commenting out those lines, the application started up and ran just fine, displaying dialogs that invoke our VB6 COM servers to perform calculations and print reports. Amazing! We need to keep developing our code in VB6 for our current clients, but the batch processing and code-test-fix methodology will allow us to convert a changing code base without making the same changes twice, once in VB6 and again in VB.Net. ASC has been providing this application to businesses for over 25 years and we have successfully migrated from the mini-computer platform in the past. A rewrite would be impossible with an application such as ours that has evolved over so many years. Our client base has grown steadily during that time, and now includes 100’s of small to midsized firms with networks of 5 to 30 concurrent users of our application, and 20 of the top financial institutions in the nation, two of which have over 100 concurrent users of our application. With this tool, we will be able to support our existing platform and roll out a VB.Net version with minimal disruption to our clients.

Thanks, CodeArchitects! And a special thank to Francesco Balena for the job he did in developing this great VB6/.NET migration tool. Few people in this industy believed that such a product could be implemented and could have been so effective, including Microsoft who never really invested in a migration tool. Our company invested a lot of time and money on VB6 products, and we left abandoned to our destiny when VB.NET was released, together with many VB6 developers. Code Architects managed to create such a tool, thanks to their determination, perseverance, and deep knowledge of both migration techniques and VB6/VB.NET inner workings. From now on, VB6 applications *can* be migrated, at last! We have adopted VB Migration Partner since the beginning of the beta test program, and we stressed it on large complex projects (over 110,000 lines of code) that contain both custom and 3rd-party components, ADO, intensive Windows API usage, advanced graphics, sockets, even a script compiler. We always got great results and were able to migrate our projects by just adding a few migration directives (pragmas) to teach VB Migration Partner how to behave in a few special cases.

I’d like to thank the VB Migration Team for your excellent work and support with our automation project. We had a very tight time-line to build our equipment and limited resources to do all the mechanical, electrical and software work required. The VB Migration Team allowed me to off-load the VB-to C# software migration work. I’d like to thank everyone on the team for all your help on this project. Everything is working well and the equipment is ready to ship on schedule. It's been a real pleasure working with the VB Migration team. Your team was always available when I needed your help, I couldn't have asked for better support. Thanks again!

Visual Basic Migration Partner from Code Architects is the product that Microsoft should have supplied instead of that dreadful Upgrade Wizard! It is fast, efficient and informative. However I'm going to say more about Code Architects technical support. In my experience this is second to none and is THE model of good support that others should aspire to. Even questions that I now see are trivial, were answered quickly, clearly and courteously. There was no feeling of 'we are the experts and you are an idiot' that you find in some places. The speed of reply is outstanding - normally replies come within two or three hours and often much quicker. The answers are answers to the questions that I actually asked - it is clear that the support team has taken care to understand to read my questions. The replies themselves are full, providing a clear course of action, and give reasons for that action and helpful background information and suggestions. When dealing with some rather obscure aspect of the properties of a control, I came across a small problem in VBMP. I received a correction later on that same day. What more could you want? In short, while using VBMP tech support I have never felt that I was going to be left dangling.

VB Migration Partner allows us to automate large parts of the conversion work, and, since the conversion is 1:1, the tool further offers the advantage of bringing all functionality to the new platform.