Motivation:
I hate to be disappointed. Specially if it is by a person you had respect for. And that's exactly what Francisco Balena from VB Migration Partner, has done. I have respected him for his books and all his VB6 experience. In terms of legacy VB6 code he is a monster. He is the man.
But in terms of code migration...
I'm not saying this because I work on code migration or maybe I'm biased a little by the fact that I work almost 10 years with a company that has done source code migration research on a big number of legacy languages such as COBOL, RPG, PL\1, Algol, Progress, PowerBuilder and also VB6.
I can tell the difference between a "compiler" and a system that rewrites a expression to the closest equivalent in the target language. We are aware of limitations. We are aware of paradigm differences and functional equivalence, but we talk from experience. We talk about our results. And we have proven those things we talk about.
Let's says you create a Cobol Library with a "MOVE" function, and a COBOLPicture Type and add minus, divide, and add operators. And I write something like:
CobolPicture x = new CobolPicture("XXXX");
x.move(10);
x.add(10);
We have things like that, and it works. It's feasible and maybe there are cases where that is a solution. But we are also proud of have researchers that have been able to detect pattern to rewrite something like that like:
int x = 0;
x = 10;
x+=10;
And saying, that something is not possible just because you can't or you dont like it, just seem uneducated to me.
All of this has motivated me to start a series of chapters I for a small blog book I will call VB Migration (not for the weak of mind).
For those of you, who really are tecnology savvy and are in the process of a VB Migration, this is YOUR book.