Established in 1988, Speed-IT Ltd. is an Independent Software Vendor offering consultancy, programming and support to a growing base of clients in the Irish and overseas markets, from Small and Medium Enterprises to multinational corporations.
Based in County Wexford, Ireland, Speed-It is focused on the container industry, developing software for some of the major container leasing and trading companies. Its main product, called EQS Professional, is a server-based, 650,000 lines-of-code application aimed towards companies in the container sales and rental business, providing full inventory/asset tracking plus comprehensive reporting.
EQS Professional used Microsoft SQL 2000 database on Windows 2003 Server to support high volumes of transactions and manage large record files, and was written in Visual Basic 6.0, making extensive use of ASP, and Speed-IT wanted to take advantage of Microsoft’s new platform capabilities.
Speed-IT began looking for a migration tool that would ease their transition to the .NET platform, starting with the Microsoft Upgrade Wizard. This free utility that ships with Visual Studio was soon discarded, due to its limitations, so Speed-IT looked for other options available in the market.
Selecting Mobilize.Net’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion and another tool from a competitor for the evaluation, Speed-IT prepared a small test project assembled from their application, which contained some typical maintenance screens and an operational transaction to see how well it was migrated and what types of errors they may encounter.
The results moved Speed–IT to unarguably choose the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion. As Bert Oakes, Speed-IT’s Technical Manager put it, “Overall, the evaluation left me really impressed, as the VBUC generated .NET native code, giving very few and easily handled compile time errors”.
In their application, the datacombo ActiveX control was used quite heavily, and it was upgraded perfectly to .NET by the VBUC during the evaluation. However, .NET ComboBoxes do not have properties such as Boundtext, rowsource (ADODB.recordsets), BoundColumn or ListField, which were used everywhere in the application, so Speed-IT created a Helper Class in .NET that contained all the properties and methods required from the legacy DataCombo. They did this by creating a class that inherited from the Windows Forms ComboBox control, adding the missing properties to that class and then using the VBUC’s Custom Maps capability to add the final transformation rules.
Licensing Mobilize.Net’s VB6 to .NET migration product allowed Speed-IT to save time and cost on their migration project. Plus the main difference with the competitor’s tool was that the output is fully readable and maintainable .NET code, without ties to proprietary runtimes.
“We found the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to be a very powerful product. We evaluated other migration tools and chose the VBUC not only because of its advanced conversion capabilities and the quality of the generated .NET code, but because we definitely wanted to avoid dependencies on extensive proprietary runtimes with no long-term .NET compatibility guarantee, plus any support fees associated with such third-party libraries”, concluded Tom Hosgood, Speed-IT’s Managing Director.
Established in 1988, Speed-IT Ltd. is an Independent Software Vendor offering consultancy, programming and support to some of the major container leasing and trading companies in the Irish and overseas markets.
Speed-IT’s flagship application, called EQS Professional, is a server-based, 650,000 lines-of-code system that provides inventory/asset tracking and comprehensive reporting. It was written in Visual Basic 6.0, making extensive use of ASP, and Speed-IT was looking forward to take full advantage of Microsoft’s .NET platform capabilities.
Speed-IT began looking for a migration tool that would ease their transition to the .NET platform, selecting the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion over other competing migration tools. The decision was based on the VBUC’s powerful capabilities, and the fact that it generated .NET native code, giving very few and easy to handle compile time errors.
Licensing Mobilize.Net's VB6 to .NET migration product allowed Speed-IT to save time and cost on their migration project, while obtaining fully readable and maintainable .NET code,. At the same time, they avoided dreaded dependencies on extensive proprietary runtimes that provide no long-term .NET compatibility guarantee, plus any support fees or other hassles associated with such third-party libraries
For more information about automated legacy migration software and services from Mobilize.Net, or to request information on migrating your applications, contact us and a software modernization professional will get back to you. Please send an email to info@mobilize.net
