By Imran Salahuddin | Published on March 12th, 2021 | Last updated on September 30th, 2024 |
Migrating from VB6 to .NET is not a simple loading of a platform into existing software. There are many stakeholders within the process. In addition to counting the end customers of the business who wishes to migrate from VB6 to .NET, there are in house developers, product managers, operations manager, senior company management and more. There will be questions in everyone’s mind about the migration, and it is always better to listen to everyone’s concerns right at the start. When going systematically through everyone’s concern important key points which will be identified ensuring easier acceptance once complete.
Let us break down the process of beginning migration in even more detail, the process starts asking and answering questions from within the organizations. Having these questions documented an answer bye all stakeholders is a starting point of success.
As the migrations process begins, there will be some pre-migration activities which may uncover poor coding practices such as, too many lines of codes that goes nowhere or does nothing. During the code auditing, it is better avoid blaming the old code but rather keep the focused on the new after migration application.
VB6 applications are known to use many native and third-party controls. Many of the third-party controls may not be compatible with .Net. Note when using these third-party controls, you may limit the speed and performance of the .Net platform. If there are no appropriate third-party controls, then what is the alternate the path to provide the desired functionality?
This is one of the steps that will decide if the migration can be automated, or if it must be fully manual. If the legacy code is full of bugs and the code quality is poor, you might not want an automated migration process. Here developers, software testers, and quality assurance engineers must be honest in the evaluation of the current system.
After there is a picture of what the scope of individual activities will be, there will be a time frame to commit to and some parts of the migrations will have a no-compromise component as well, which are the functionalities. Putting the business first instead of the technology, it is important that the business logic and software functionalities are not sacrificed in favor of a smooth transition.
Finally, you need a technology partner who has a history of successful migrations, while many of the migrations fail even before starting. Macrosoft has bucked that trend by constantly landing on the expectations of our clients. If you have doubts or concerns about migrating to .Net from VB6, contact us as we are more than happy to help.
