VB6 AI Migrator
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The VB6 AI Migrator transforms the built-in VB6 controls to their corresponding .NET counterpart. For these controls, the properties are extracted and translated into their equivalents when possible or upgraded to the closest approach available.
The list of all the intrinsic VB6 controls and their respective target structures for the latest version of the VB6 AI Migrator can be found at the following URL: https://www.gapvelocity.ai/vbtonet/vbuc-basic-features/intrinsic-control-mappings
When a property, method, or member is not supported, all the references to that member are replaced with an informational message that pauses the execution to allow the user to select whether to ignore the missing reference or to break the execution and implement the missing functionality. This feature is available not only for inherent graphical controls but for all the entire application, as explained in the following article:
Structure/Library Improvements: Unsupported member/Statement Handling
A Third Party Control is a component that is not included as part of the built-in set of VB6 controls or that has to be read from an external binary file (ocx, dll) . This definition applies even if it’s built by Microsoft of by your own company.
Note: User controls are handled differently. When a VB6 project includes a definition for user control, and all the required source code is included in the migration solution, the VB6 AI Migrator will upgrade the control definition and its references to .NET. The VB6 AI Migrator upgrades user controls and their dependencies, avoiding the use of COM interoperability.
In the context of this document we will work with the following definition of a third party control:
Third-Party Control: the graphical user interface components and controls for which the source code is not included in the VB6 AI Migrator migration solution.
To better understand this idea, picture the following example:
There is a VB6.0 application made up of the following two folders:
Depending on how you configure the VB6 AI Migrator Migration Solution, the references to the UserControlOne component will be handled as a third party or not:
This second scenario is what happens when a 3rd party control is added to the project.
The VB6 AI Migrator upgrades a limited set of Third Party Controls to their .NET equivalents. This set was created based on requirements from GAPVelocity AI’s migration experience. These Third Party Controls are ported to native .NET components, which includes the built-in .NET controls included with the .NET Framework, new .NET version of the control from the same vendor and equivalent .NET controls from different vendors. The supported controls list is constantly being expanded, both with new controls being supported and with increased coverage of the currently converted controls.
The VB6 AI Migrator keeps the references to the unsupported controls by means of a Runtime Callable Wrapper. The VB6 AI Migrator uses the “tlbimp.exe” utility from the .NET Framework to create these wrappers (Type Library Importer (Tlbimp.exe))
The resulting DLL will allow the managed .NET code to coexist with COM components using specific marshaling techniques. This method is the fastest way to get your code into .NET, since the resulting application after the migration includes the same controls as in the original, and as such reduces the amount of manual effort required to achieve functional equivalence. It, however, has the downside of keeping unsupported legacy controls, which can represent an evolutionary obstacle in the long run.
The VB6 AI Migrator is built on top of a proprietary Artificial Intelligence-based technology that allows the description of transformation rules, special cases, and exceptions on specific patterns with ease. The simple syntax and fast development approach allow us to satisfy our customer-specific needs with minimal response times. New migration rules are constantly added when migrations are performed by GAPVelocity AI’s Consulting Services; and they are also offered for large enterprise customers to obtain software migration solutions that satisfy very specific technical requirements
The customization requirements often include adding support for additional Third Party Components and special transformations for their usage patterns. This type of extensibility is very powerful since it allows the definition of highly complex transformations, but it depends on GAPVelocity AI’s engineering team to provide these extensions.
With the latest version of the VB6 AI Migrator, GAPVelocity AI provides their customers with a simple customization option to add partial support for the migration of Third Party Controls. This is called Custom Maps, and will be covered in the next section.
