Announcing VBUC 8.0

We just keep makin' it better. 

Today we're deeply pleased to announce the general availability of version 8.0 of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, the world's most-used legacy migration tool. 

With this release, we continue with the theme of moving the needle on your productivity in migrating apps from VB6 to.NET or even all the way to the web. To that end, there are three major areas of improvements in version 8:

Faster Migrations

By taking advantage of multiple cores and managing memory on large projects better, the VBUC will process very large VB6 ( >2MLOC) solutions faster and more efficiently. Up to 10x speed-ups are possible by processing each VB project in parallel using separate cores. Using 8 cores and 32GB or memory, up to 12 projects can be processed simultaneously.

We re-wrote the memory model to handle very large projects better. Previously, the old memory model could cause some bottlenecking on projects larger than 2MLOC.

Better Code Generation

We have improved the code generated by the migration tool in several important areas:

• Shared files bridge: It's not uncommon in VB6 to declare an object in a shared file, then instantiate various types with the same name in different modules. Since VB6 is not strongly typed, it's difficult to know how to resolve these implementations. We now create a "shared files bridge" class to make the generated code more readable and accurate in the migrated app. Please see the release notes for more details.
• We now fully support drag 'n' drop behavior in VB6 controls.
• We now recognize when ByRef parameters can be passed by value instead of as references and create better, more readable code.
• We handle MousePointer types better by converting them correctly to Cursor type classes.

More Coverage

• Nine new component libraries have been added to the existing mappings database
• 15 existing libraries have been enhanced with additional mappings
• Better behavior for data access controls
• Improvements in the reflection helper class.

 Tested and Tested Some More

In addition to the 1000s of customers who choose to license our tools and do their own migration projects, quite a few turn to our deep experience to do the migration for them. Generally--but not always--these are the projects that are the most difficult, due to size (they are HUGE), complexity (many individual projects, many dependencies), or other factor. This gives us a test bed that includes not only our vast set of unit tests but over 24 million lines of VB6 code we can throw at any VBUC release. Such a huge test suite lets us plot the improvements in code quality in terms of reducing post-migration compiler errors to deal with, as well as benchmarks for a variety of project types. 

Get your free trial of VBUC 8.0 today and see how you like it.