Role of the Upgrade Wizard

Role of the Upgrade Wizard

The Upgrade Wizard imports your Visual Basic 6 applications into Visual Basic .NET. The wizard is activated when you open a Visual Basic 6 project from Visual Basic .NET. Unlike moving from previous versions of Visual Basic to Visual Basic 6, upgrading to Visual Basic .NET is hardly a simple operation involving only minor changes. The Upgrade Wizard has to make significant structural and functional changes to your code. These changes are necessary because of a number of differences in the structure of Visual Basic .NET. You should not expect the Upgrade Wizard to produce an application that works perfectly. In the vast majority of applications, you will need to make modifications and fixes to get everything compiled and running smoothly.

Many of the technologies used in your applications will upgrade easily to their equivalents in the .NET Framework via the Upgrade Wizard. Certain Visual Basic 6 project types are not supported, however. Two project types that do not map to Visual Basic .NET and are not supported by the Upgrade Wizard are ActiveX DHTML page projects and ActiveX document projects. You will have to either rewrite or manually convert these project types to another project type before upgrading.

The Upgrade Report

The Upgrade Wizard produces a report that highlights problem areas in your code that it encountered during the upgrade process. This report includes items that the wizard left alone because they could not be upgraded. The wizard also inserts comments into your code to help guide you through the remainder of the upgrade and provides pointers to additional documentation. Figure 3-1 shows a sample upgrade report.

Figure 3-1

An upgrade report.

Not Just a One-Trick Pony

Without a doubt, the Upgrade Wizard is the best way to move applications from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET. Although it is possible to do the work by hand, the Upgrade Wizard can do most or all of the grunt work for you. It enables you, the developer, to focus on a smaller number of details rather than trying to figure out how to cram Visual Basic 6 classes, modules, and forms into a Visual Basic .NET equivalent.

In addition to making the upgrade process easier to manage, the Upgrade Wizard can also be used to analyze existing applications so that you can improve them beforehand, smoothing the eventual upgrade. The upgrade report highlights all of the issues that your application will face. The issues you discover will also help you determine the effort that will be required to complete the upgrade before you start down the upgrade path.