email article printer friendly

Should You Migrate VB6 Apps to .NET?
Federico Zoufaly—executive vice president at ArtinSoft, the company that provided the VB migration wizard in Visual Studio .NET—discusses the challenges facing VB6 developers who want to migrate to .NET.
by Patrick Meader

June 2003 Issue

Federico Zoufaly is vice president of operations at ArtinSoft, the company Microsoft contracted with to write the .NET migration tool that ships with Visual Studio .NET. Patrick Meader, VSM editor in chief, talks to Zoufaly about the challenges of migrating applications from VB6 to VB.NET. Among the items discussed: How do you know whether it makes sense to migrate a particular application?

PM: Obviously, it would make my life easier as the editor of Visual Studio Magazine if absolutely everyone who uses VB5 and VB6 upgraded to VB.NET. One reason I think this hasn't happened (among others) is that people are disappointed by the level of the translation the upgrade wizard provides. What do you think needs to happen for existing VB5 and VB6 developers who haven't made the transition to .NET to take the big plunge? Is this something that a more complete conversion tool can make more compelling?

FZ: That's an interesting question, but a difficult one to answer. I think you have to look at the background of the tool before you can answer this.

Visual Basic .NET marks the first time a software company has made a conversion tool critical to upgrading your apps. The only way to open a VB6 project in VB.NET is through the conversion tool. But this has made us think a lot about whether someone needs to convert an application and what variables should play a role in that kind of decision.

Figure 1. When Should You Migrate to VB.NET?

At ArtinSoft, we've come up with a magic quadrant, where the axes are uniqueness and quality (see Figure 1). The more unique the app and the better the quality, the more likely you will be to benefit from converting the application. This quadrant covers the bigger part of how to determine whether to perform a conversion, but there's an additional dimension—the dynamism of the business process. If you have an application that implements a stable, working set of business processes that won't change in the next five years, there is little reason to upgrade. If you have a dynamic application, you want to use the best tool possible to maintain it. VB.NET is a better tool for that sort of thing than VB5 and VB5 are. The dynamism of the business process is critically important. That's why there are still 30-year old Cobol applications out there. They run, and the business processes haven't changed. The cost of moving these cannot be justified.

My point is that it's not just a question of how well an upgrade tool works. There are many other factors that will play a role in making that decision. Whenever I discuss these issues, I start from this standpoint: Assuming you want to move, a migration tool can help.

But the fact is, VB6 and VB.NET are not the same language, and there are significant paradigm shifts. You can always write a translation tool that translates 100 percent. Any compiler is a translation tool that converts 100 percent. But it generates code unusable for human consumption. It brings things from a higher level of abstraction to a lower level of abstraction. We have had to make some difficult choices when translating code from VB6 to VB.NET. For example, would it make an app less maintainable to translate a particular kind of code? .NET is a more powerful language than VB6, so there is always a way to achieve the same effect in VB.NET. But whether you want to do so through a straight conversion is a different matter.

Dr. Federico Zoufaly is the executive vice president of operations at ArtinSoft, the company Microsoft contracted to create the .NET conversion tool that ships with VS.NET. Dr. Zoufaly has held various positions within ArtinSoft, including researcher, product manager, and project manager. Dr. Zoufaly is also a founding and present member of the company's Board of Directors. Dr. Zoufaly received a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering and a master's in computer science, both from El Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica (ITCR). In 2002, he received a Ph.D. in computer science from The University of Florida.