Enter The Critics (2)

If you are still hell bent on just upgrading your code, Microsoft has developed an upgrade tool to analyze our code and help us decide what will need to change for VB.NET. I have included some links at the end of the article about upgrading to VB.NET. The tool seems like a nice gesture by Microsoft, but after reading all of the changes to the syntax, I think only my comments won't need changes. I also don't see it possible, and Microsoft doesn't claim, for this program to catch everything, so I won't put my money here. To test my theory I ran the analyzer on a small program I built in VB6. It had a lot things that is auto changed, such as syntax issues. Then it made a list of things I needed to fix, and the list was not short. I took the time to fix everything that needed it. When complete, I looked at how the application was written. It did work fine, but I really found no benefit to making it a .NET application. So I scrapped the code and started fresh. When I was done, the application used many of the new features in .NET and resulted in less code. This is not to say that all applications will involve less code in .NET.

If your now saying this won't work for you because your application is too large to convert all at once, then piece the conversion together. Take a distinct piece at a time and convert. You can choose to only update your middle ware components and have the ASP remain 3.0.

What I find significant is that the .NET platform has been available for over a year now. Microsoft has given us time to slowly get acquainted with it. They in no way dropped us on our heads. We have the chance to hit the ground running when the platform is officially released, which supposedly will be some time this year or first quarter next.