Debating on VB to VB.NET Migration

Microsoft is trying to shift all its technologies to .NET platform. But this does not mean that you should also migrate to .NET platform, unless you have done enough research on why you should migrate from VB to VB.NET. The significant advantage of using VB.NET is that it is purely object oriented. Moreover, it provides managed code execution that makes the application more robust, stable, and secure.

Error handling in VB.NET has considerably increased the efficiency of the applications and free threading is a plus point as against to single threading in Visual Basic. The code access security feature in VB.NET has controls on what the code can access. Therefore, after considering that there will be considerable improvement in terms of robustness and scalability of your applications you can migrate from VB to VB.NET. There are two strategies through which you can migrate from VB to VB.NET:

• MigrationWizard: In .NET Framework IDE, Visual Studio.NET, you can find a Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard that helps migrate your Visual Basic application to VB.NET. But through this wizard you cannot upgrade all the VB to VB.NET. You have to manually make some modifications. This wizard produces a report in HTML format suggesting the places where it failed to modify the VB to VB.NET.

• Fresh Design: You have to redesign certain core blocks or modules of the application or redesign the entire application to shift to VB.NET. Though you can reuse existing components, because managed code run in tandem with unmanaged code, you have to rework on design, code, and deployment of the application before migrating to VB.NET.

While migrating from VB to VB.NET you should not use late binding and lines and shapes are not supported in VB.NET. Instead you can make use of images. Moreover, in VB.NET you have to use only Zero-Bound array.