by John Browne, on Nov 13, 2013 1:00:00 AM
We're excited today to announce the availability of Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 2013, which we're shipping simultaneously with Visual Studio 2013.
What's new? The most obvious change is that we now support targeting solutions for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, so you won't need to go through the conversion step when you open your newly-migrated .NET solution in Visual Studio.
Other changes include:
- Windows 8 and 8.1 support
- Removed the dependency for VS libs on your migration machine. This means you don't have to have Visual Studio running on the same machine as VBUC and VB6 (which are required to do the migration).
- Added a link to submit a help request (support ticket).
- More controls and patterns can be automatically migrated.
VBUC remains the fastest and most efficient way to migrate your VB source code to modern platforms. Using automation can save up to 95% of the cost of a manual rewrite, and it won't introduce the new bugs that writing original code always does.
It doesn't always make sense to migrate application code. But in a lot of cases, it's the best alternative. Here's a real-world example:
SSP is a large UK-based ISV with an insurance application comprising over 9MM lines of VB code. They knew they needed to get off of an unsupported platform, and they wanted to move to .NET as a stepping stone to a full service-oriented architecture, but how to migrate that much code? The cose of a manual rewrite--not to mention the risk--would be astronomical. Instead they turned to Mobilize.Net and the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to automate the overwhelming majority of the migration tasks. According to Chief Software Architect Robert Courtney, they chose the VBUC so they could get pure .NET code without a third party runtime and for the "considerable savings" they received.
Ready to try it out? Just click the button below:
