Extending Visual Basic Legacy Application Without Migration

Many of the classic Visual Basic 6 applications are not ready to jump on migration to the .Net world so in this situation any enhancement or up-gradation to these applications is like a nightmare to fulfill business requirements.

COM interoperability features provided by the .Net framework work as a remedy in this situation without changing or upgrading the existing application. Complete cost in terms of both resources and time of a full rewrite of the application can be prohibited. Enhanced UI Interop user controls can be developed in .Net and can be used in VB6 form.

Component object model (COM) interop is one of the interoperability mechanisms that the .Net common language runtime (CLR) offer. This enables to interact the unmanaged code to managed code.

Some Business Challenges of Legacy Migration

• Complexity of the environment and dependency on file server based system.
• Lack of budget to start migration from scratch.
• Business is used to with classic software.
• Dearth of VB6 developer to optimize and understand the code.
• No visibility of further business growth to invest in migration.

Benefits of Leveraging .Net Code in VB6 Legacy Application

• Need to accommodate new features and business demand without writing VB6 code.
• Make reusable component both class library and UI controls.
• Easy and faster development leverage visual studio editor features.
• More scalable and managed code driven by .Net framework benefit.
• Well architecture loosely coupled service oriented code.