Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET Migration Approach
As described in the previous chapter, the Visual Basic language has undergone major changes, and many new features have been incorporated to transform it into a true object-oriented language. Many keywords that led to unstructured programming have been removed from the language. Considering the amount of changes, it is necessary to assess if migrating Visual Basic applications to Visual Basic .NET is feasible. As discussed in Chapter 1 this activity is carried out during the assessment phase of migration.
This chapter will help the developers to make an assessment about migrating a Visual Basic application. It will also give an overview of the steps required for migrating Visual Basic 6.0 applications to Visual Basic .NET. It also covers the pre-migration changes so that upgrading Visual Basic 6.0 applications to Visual Basic .NET is smooth.
Road Map to Migration
Migration of any Visual Basic 6.0 application to Visual Basic .NET requires the following major steps:
-
Perform an assessment based on project selection guidelines
-
Perform changes based on pre-migration recommendations (covered in detail later in this chapter)
-
With the help of the upgrade wizard, upgrade the Visual Basic 6.0 application to Visual Basic .NET
-
Perform changes based on post-migration recommendations (covered in detail in Chapter 4)
The path for migrating a Visual Basic 6.0 application to Visual Basic .NET is represented in Figure 3-1. Brief descriptions for each of these steps are given in the subsequent subsections.
Figure 3-1. Phases of Migration to Visual Basic .NET.