Differences between migrating from vb6 to vb2005, vb2008, vb2010

Question

I own a copy of vb2005 professional. I need to migrate a vb6 project to vb.net Is there any difference in terms of effort to migrating to these editions of vb.net thanks

Answer 1

I'm rewriting a lot of VB6 currently and what I've found so far is that the previous developers had to use a lot of third party and custom modules to implement what they need when a lot of it has been included in the base class library for .Net since then.

From what I've seen there's no easy way to migrate from one to another. A lot of effort goes into these migrations. The best thing to consider is whether you want to try to go line by line or examine the code, document core functionality, evaluate how well the software has worked over it's lifetime and then engineer a new design.

That's what I've ended up doing because a line for line rewrite is nearly impossible and a large pain. Compiling libraries and modules into COM to bring the functionality into .Net applications is a lot of effort and kind of a "McGyver" approach. That's why I just documented everything well, understood the process, then wrote as .Net software.

Specifically, what functionality are you trying to maintain? Have you written in .Net before?

Answer 2

I think it's slightly easier to target the later versions. I believe the PowerPack 3.0 was added for Visual Studio 2005: it included extra support for emulating the VB6 Printer object and shape controls.

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Anyone who's read my other answers about VB6 migration should stop reading now because I've said this before... but I think it's relevant, so I'll say it again anyway.

Check out the Microsoft UK advice with a screencast explaining the 5 basic options for .Net migration. Decide which is best. People may advise you to just rewrite from scratch in .Net. Be cautious about this - you say your codebase is big, which is a danger sign for rewriting. Microsoft UK say

Performing a complete rewrite to .NET is far more costly and difficult to do well [than converting] ... we would only recommend this approach for a small number of situations.

Answer 3

In my experience the "migrate" is really a rewrite so it doesn't make any difference what version of Visual Studio you use. I'd use the latest.