On Upgrade and Migration

time to read 1 min | 185 words

So I was listening to DotNetRocks #115 (with Jackie Goldstein), and part of what they were talking about was the migration wizard that was suppose to migrate VB6 to VB.Net code. One of the thing that they brought up in the talk was that people expected that the wizard will take the code and turn it into a best-practice-using code. One of the examples that they gave was turning VB6 IO to .Net Streams IO (which the migration wizard doesn't do).

I couldn't help thinking about the poor developer who would run this hypothetical wizard and suddenly all his code is transformed from the familiar VB6 code to incomprehensible VB.Net code. I can just feel the anguish of that developer, trying to get the entire framework at once, stumbling along in a suddenly unfamiliar code base.

That is if the wizard was 100% correct, all the time. Occasionally I decide to break away from the base practice in a certain area, usually because I understand what I'm doing, and I know what needs to be done. I would hate to see what a wizard would do to this code.