Secure your Visual Basic 6.0 investment with Microsoft .NET
Visual Basic 6 – What next?UK companies have invested significant time and money in the development of applications built using the Visual Basic 6.0 language. Many of these applications are still being used successfully today, but we have seen an increasing demand for help and guidance to take these investments forward. With the help of Microsoft Partners who specialise in this area, we have pulled together resources and tools which can help you make the right decision
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What are your choices?There are currently five main choices:
Why is it a great time to stop developing in Visual Basic 6.0?Moving from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic 2008 takes less effort than you might think, thanks to a number of improvements from Microsoft and increased investment in tools and services by our Partners. ArtinSoft and Code Architects both have extremely powerful tools to automate migration and deliver functionality beyond the Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard – meaning that Visual Basic 6.0 solutions with millions of lines of code, hundreds of projects and dependencies on third-party controls can be more easily migrated than ever before. In the UK, ArtinSoft has also partnered with Avanade to deliver a service capable of tackling the largest of Visual Basic 6.0 applications. Read More How to migrate to Microsoft .NETIn many cases the best approach to take is to migrate to .NET using tools which will help automate the process. This is the quickest way to remove all dependencies on Visual Basic 6.0 and deliver a working .NET application with equivalent functionality to the original. This approach has been successfully used by many UK companies with great results. 100 per cent automatic migration to .NET is not possible 'out of the box' but the tools available are more capable than ever before and include richer customisation capabilities. Using Microsoft tools Using third-party tools
How to extend in Microsoft .NETIt's straightforward to mix business logic implemented in Visual Basic 6.0 with business logic implemented in .NET, but originally it was difficult to mix forms and controls which prevented many companies from writing new functionality in .NET. However, Microsoft has solved this problem with the release of the Interop Forms Toolkit.
How to rewrite in Microsoft .NETPerforming a complete rewrite to .NET is far more costly and difficult to do well than the previous two options but in certain circumstances is the right choice and is explored in more detail in the eBook on Upgrading Visual Basic 6.0 Applications. Normally we would only recommend this approach for a small number of situations including:
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Case Studies - What others are sayingThere are thousands of companies that have achieved success using Visual Basic .NET. Check out some of these success stories from our migration partners. CodeArchitects SIS Datenverarbeitung GmbH ArtinSoft Banamex - Citigroup MDA Property Systems HSI – LatNav Vertex Mortgage Application Processing System Vertex Supervisor Application Vertex Story 1 from ArtinSoftVertex Story 2 from ArtinSoftActivus from ArtinSoftCodeArchitects ResourcesThe following resources will help you decide what is the right next step for you:
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