Converting from VB6.0 to C#.Net
Dear reader,
one way or another I will have to convert a legacy application, written in VB6.0, to the wonderful, well-supported .Net platform. Because many a programmer knows C#.Net better than VB.Net I will have to make that change happen as well…
What to do, what to do? There is no documentation available of the current application, which is roughly divided in 2 dozen dlls… I will have to setup a classdiagram and others in order to componentise the application. As I found on Stack Overflow a tool I could probably use to save me some time is Visual UML, a tool which is capable of reverse-engineering of Visual Basic (VB), C#, Java and Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET) code.
Once I have created that classdiagram, I can fill in the details where Visual UML left me standing. By that means I hope to have mapped the current application well enough to understand where conversion can lead to challenges.
Converting VB to VB.Net is not that hard, as I understand from Dennis Hayes in his blog posts about converting VB to VB.Net and C# (part 1, part 2, part 3). However, I will have to adress conversion issues because VB.Net is not the same as VB6.0, I’ve found even more about that upgrading proces at The Scarms. I’ll blog later on how I’ll deal with these issues. GBVB (GoodBye Visual Basic) is a project which will allow me to dynamically convert VB.Net to C#.Net, however even here are some issues involved in converting. I will adress them later on my blog.
Next week I’ll dive into the classdiagram generation from VB6.0 code. Stay tuned, for I will blog about that later!
