VB6 to VB .NET Upgrade Wizard Gets a Bum Rap

As of today, 273 Microsoft MVPs and 4,152 other interested parties have signed a petition to "further develop VB6 and VBA." The petition's request to include "VB.COM" (a.k.a. "Classic VB" and "vbclassic") in future versions of the Visual Studio IDE has fallen on deaf ears in Redmond. One of the petition's FAQs states:

"Microsoft provided a migration wizard intended to ease the transition from VB6 to VB.NET, true. There is near-universal agreement that using this tool to port code assets is an incomplete solution at best, in that leaves myriad "TODO:"'s scattered throughout the translated code. At worst, the migration wizard is an extremely poor choice in that, unlike a complete rewrite, it doesn't take full advantage of all that the new platform offers."

Migrating production VB6 code to VB 2002 or later is a controversial topic, but the VS 2002 Upgrade Wizard worked fine for me. In 2001 I wrote a large-scale ASP Web application (VBScript) with three VB6 data access layer classes (ActiveX DLLs) that connected to a 1-GB demonstration SQL Server database containing the entire contents of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) obtained from the GPO's beta version of the eCFR. (It's still in the beta stage.) Another VB6 project translated the CFR sections' SGML to XHTML and stored the data in a varchar or text column, depending on the size of the section. Subsequently, I used the SOAP Toolkit 2.0 (beta 2) to wrap the classes as RPC/Encoded Web services. Here's the history of the initial version and the first upgrade process:

• CFR-COM (mid-2001) used Active Server Pages and conventional Visual Basic 6.0 ActiveX DLLs for TOC navigation, text display, and full-text search operations. Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.7 handled database access.
• CFR-SOAP (late-2001) was CFR-COM upgraded to XML Web services with the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 2.0 Beta 2 and MDAC 2.7 for database access.

When Visual Studio .NET, as it was called at the time, went gold, I rewrote the client in ASP.NET 1.0. Then I gave the Upgrade Wizard a shot at upgrading the three classes, which totaled about 10,000 lines of code, to VB .NET for conversion to ASP.NET Document/Literal XML Web services. Here's the history:

• CFR-ASPX (January 2002) was CFR-SOAP with all pages upgraded from ASP to ASP.NET with Visual Basic .NET managed code and MDAC 2.7.
• CFR-Final (February 2002) is the final version that replaced COM-SOAP components with ASP.NET XML Web Services for text display, navigation, and search operations. ADO.NET SqlConnection, SqlCommand, and SqlDataReader objects handle database access.

Here are links to the Wizard's Upgrade Reports for the CFRTocWS (table of contents navigation), CFRSectWS (formatted sections), and CFRSearchWS (full-text search). I spent about two or three hours searching for and fixing known VB6 upgrade issues and than ran the Wizard. Each upgrade report had one warning. Not bad for version 1.0 of a very complex code conversion utility, at least in my opinion. I switched from VB6 to VB .NET and never looked back. Writing VBA code to update clients' Access applications now seems to me like trying to write this blog in Brasilian Portuguese.

Note: In August 2002, the OakLeaf CFR Web Service project won the charter Microsoft .NET Best Award for horizontal solutions. The "Use XML Attributes to Navigate Data" .NETInsight article explains the CFRTocWS service's navigation features and "Run Full-Text Database Searches on a Shoestring" describes the CFRSearchWS service.