As you may know, the leap from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET is a long one. VB.NET is basically a whole new language, and thus will take a long, long time to migrate all of the existing VB6 programs out there to .NET.

Microsoft does provide a conversion wizard, which helps make the transition easier. I have never used that wizard before, so this evening I decided to take one of my old VB6 applications and convert it to VB.NET, to see how easy that transition would be.

Using the wizard itself is very easy. In Visual Studio 2003, choose File | Open | Convert from the IDE menu. VS.NET will then ask you a few questions to locate your old project. After a warning that indicated some conversions can take hours, it ended up taking not more than a minute for my tiny Windows application.

The conversion wizard is good in that it tells you where it had trouble converting, and marks the code accordingly. The wizard isn't perfect of course. It would be too much to expect that it could be. In my case, the wizard thought it had a problem converting one of the ADODB recordsets. But it didn't - everything was OK. The program compiled and ran correctly without any major modifications on my part.

As you know, programs under .NET are fundamentally designed differently than the old VB6 way of doing things. For instance, data access using ADO.NET is completely different than ADODB. ADO.NET uses disconnected datasets to enable database access. In my experiment, the conversion wizard retained the ADODB way of doing things. My program could be signifcantly improved (performance, scalability, extensibility, portability, etc.) if I made the extra effort to convert everything to ADO.NET.

So it's up to the developer to rewrite the program for the .NET way of doing things. But all in all, the wizard was a great help.