Is this the Holy Grail of Microsoft developers?  I read Francesco's post on the fruits of his two-year quest to deliver us from VB6 hell, checked out the new Website for the "VB Migration Partner" product, and hope beyond hope that this is IT.  The Real McCoy.  The Ultimate Tool.  The one and only rational way to drag the IT departments of a million businesses and government departments into our wonderful .NET millennium, out of the tragic, RAD adventures of 1990s-style software crapshoots.

Clearly, Microsoft recognized the problem when they brought out .NET.  They created an Upgrade Wizard that was bundled with Visual Studio versions for .NET.  It pretty much handled a lot of obvious stuff and failed at a lot of obvious challenges.  When pressed for typical successful conversion rates in the early days, some people said the Upgrade Wizard could convert "at least" 80% of the lines of VB6 code.  And I haven't heard anyone say anything about the Upgrade Wizard for at least five years.  It's like that hideous thing locked in the basement.

You know Microsoft doesn't like one of its own products when it trots out a second try, completely divorced from the first.  In the past year, they produced tools to do piecemeal substitution on VB6 code, supporting a recommendation to rewrite each form object in a VB6 application in .NET.  A developer could do that a bit at the time, so that the massive manual labor could be spread out. 

I've worked on some of those hybrid monstrosities.  Let's take the DNA of VB6 (Sorry about that pun!  Anybody remember Microsoft DNA?) with a few C++ components, dabble in a C#, VB.NET, or J# component or UI element, and push that out to the customers.  Then they wonder why it takes forever to get a small update or fix on the beast (More like forever squared, since anyone doing this nonsense already forgot how the original, "pristine" 1990's application did anything and now it's a bastard of multiple languages and bad habits.  I'll say it: these are mutant bastards.).

OK, now it is 2008 and VB6 denial is a fatal habit.  The clock has just about run out.  Not only does VB6 support end in March of this year, most of the current operating systems that support it will be obsolete in a while.  And don't think those applications will always connect to the corporate database flavor of the month (I've heard Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, and other vendors actually force you to do database patches and upgrades.  Don't they know you have a business to run?).  Yeah, we know you are running NT4 out there!  As they say, so many Windows 2000 desktops, so little time to support them.  Somehow, I doubt that Fortune 1000 company X will really want to call up Joe Don's Computer Emporium and Nail Salon in a desperate search for grizzled Windows 95 specialists the next time the consolidated corporate financial report application bites the big one.

If "VB Migration Partner" is half the product that I know Francesco can do, the Cavalry has arrived.  Your bacon is saved.  Maybe your business is saved.  If there is anyone out there that can describe how important this can be, in little sound bites with great PowerPoint graphics, please let me know.  I know some folks that desperately need to hear that story the right way, right now.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 1-11-2008