Browsing through some of the good old VB to .NET migration
resources I’ve accumulated through all these years, I rediscovered a Dr.
Dobb’s interview by Scott
Swigart with Jay Roxe. Among
other things, they talked about the motivations for migrating from Visual Basic
6.0 to the .NET platform, either to VB.NET or C#, and some of the benefits of
the new environment.
Putting aside the VB6 support end concerns, he describes the
lifecycle of any application as one of the motivations for a .NET upgrade: “The application has reached a point where
the code has grown beyond its original scope, and it's time to rewrite the
application anyways, and it just makes sense to transition to the latest development
platform at the same time”. Other incentives relate directly to the .NET
Framework’s new functionality and development capabilities, and that’s where
the benefits come under the spotlight. For instance, he mentions that “We're also seeing, particularly for some of
our Web customers, that when they took a VB6/ASP application, and moved it to a
VB.NET/ASP.NET application, it was 300 percent more scalable, and they got 200
percent more throughput from the application”.
Roxe also explains how the ClickOnce technology solves the
DLL Hell issue by providing better deployment and management, checking the
prerequisites availability before installing the application itself, with the
option of setting up version checking and without impact to any other
applications on the machine. There’s also the possibility of deploying a COM
component with an application without having to register it, allowing multiple side-by-side
installations of that component without conflicts.
Finally, he responds to the questions around choosing the
programming language (VB.NET or C#) once you decide to move to the .NET platform,
adding some advice around VB to .NET migrations and pointing some of the
available resources. You can read the whole article here,
and if you have a VB to .NET migration project in your hands or want to share
any experience you’ve had with such upgrades, I’d definitely love to hear about
it.