Support Statement: Translation Challenges

Owned by Mark Juras
Last updated: Jun 28, 2023

This pages is a list of some of the technical matters that can cause challenges during an upgrade project.  There are many ways to address these issues and their impact varies from project to project.


1. What issues have you seen with a VB6 to VB.net migration? Please provide the lowest level of specificity on this.


  • Variant, Late Binding
  • Array Conventions
  • String Functions
  • Collections
  • Option Strict or not?
  • Error Handling – do you want to use try-catch instead
  • Printing
  • Gosub/Goto
  • Conditional Compilation
  • COM
  •  etc.


2. What issues have you seen with a toolset like Sheridan and converting it to a new platform like VB.net native tools?

  • component conventions -- mask edit, date formats,
  • FRX data
  • Event models
  • etc.

3. What issues have you seen with data access code conversions?

  • Depends on if you use ADO-look-alike wrapper
  • Schema data handled differently -- datacolumns/row array versus fields collection
  • Navigateion behavior
  • Server-side vs Client-side cursors
  • Events
  • Error collections
  • Connection Properties
  • UPdate/BatchUpdate
  • Behind the SQL scenes commands
  • etc.

4. What issues have you seen with web service usage conversions?

  • SOAP
  • MSXML.HTTP
  • etc.

5. What UI issues have come about?

  • Form Lifetime
  • Form Class as a variable
  • Control Arrays
  • Events
  • DDE
  • Drag and Drop
  • MDI Menu Merging
  • Certain Intrinsic UI controls: data control,  file system lists
  • Style Inheritance
  • Twips vs Pixel;s
  • etc.


6. What is our approach to resolving these issues? Design pattern, tools, etc.

  • Language Specification
  • Object Model Specification
  • Runtime support code -- buy, build, borrow
  • etc.


7. How can we ensure that our approach will reduce risk and save time?

  • Analyse the scope of the effort and compare different approaches to delivering that scope.

8. How can we refactor the code to improve upon it?

  • Migration solution configuration

9. What types of governance and reporting can we do to ensure the code is converted correctly?

  • Ongoing deliverables
  • .NET Build
  • Code review results
  • Test results

10. What type of testing would we perform to ensure the application is operating effectively?

  • Side-by-Side Testing
  • Functional tests
  • Stress Testing

11. Would we incorporate NUnit tests as part of the conversion?

  • If desired.