Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

Rating:
Summary: Upgrading to Visual Basic.Net
Review: Upgrading to .net is a must have for any developer or company that is planning to use .net.
I highly recommend this book to any developers or project managers who need to rapidly understand what's involved in upgrading to .net from VB. By purchasing this booking I upgraded a VB 5/6 to VB.Net and I'm about to deliver my first .net project on time and within budget.

As with all VB releases I was both excited and daunted by the release of .net.
Being a developer who has worked from basic to VB 6.0 I was suspicious of the learning curve involved and the bombardment of books about .net. In early February my manager informed me that a client of ours was insisting on moving their VB 6 app to use the .Net framework. Instantly before my eyes I saw late nights and busy weekends whilst adapting my VB knowledge to expand into the .Net framework.
Like many developers before me, I smiled with confidence and told my project manager this upgrade could be done. As soon as his back was turned I searched the Internet and instantly got presented myriad of books about .Net.

Scanning the list I saw a familiar name "Ed Robertson", I remember this guy from a developer day's conference. He was concise and accurate whilst presentation technical and conceptual information on how to upgrade from VB to .Net

Needless to say I purchased the book and in 10 days it arrived. By resisting the temptation to start programming and actually reading the book first. I was very quickly able to upgrade one of the smaller Apps involved in system and then with planning
I tackled with confidence the main application

This book will teach you how to upgrade and more importantly what applications can be upgraded well providing you with an in depth view into the .net framework

My recommendation is that anyone who going to use .Net should purchase this book.
It will save you hours of programming and frustration as the authors drawing on there own wealth of .net experience cleverly guide you through the stormy waters of system upgrades.

Rating:
Summary: Unexpected diamond
Review: When I first got this book, I did not think I would like it very much. After all, how much can one write on upgrading from Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET?

While I believe most people will rewrite rather than upgrade, having experienced the wizard's decisions, this book has a lot of good advice to both make this an easier task and to make the right decisions in your current code if you have ever thought of upgrading.

While you expect this book to have a good deal on Interop, the gem here is the great explanation of remoting. While web services are the talk of the town, the ability to create server to server communication without creating another layer, is very important. For me, this section, alone, was worth the price of the ride.

For most, the upgrade information will be the most important, which should come as no suprise. If you are currently writing Visual Basic 6, you can learn a lot about setting up your own code to make sure it does not become legacy code when you move to .NET. Even more important, however, is the fact that following these suggestions will help you create better apps, as the suggestions for your current code are good suggestions whether the code will be upgraded or not.

One more nice gem before I sign off. The section on creating global components in .NET is wonderful. While most of your .NET apps are designed to sit in their own directories, knowing how to create shared components is very important for Enterprise development. If you are developing in .NET currently, this section details how to set up your own global components; this is an area where the documentation is a bit slim, so it makes a nice selling point for current .NET developers.

Rating:
Summary: All it takes to migrate
Review: With so much misinformation and speculation about migrating apps to vb.net, I decided to go straight to the horse's mouth for the word.
This book does the job. It demystifies the migration story. It shows how to migrate apps to vb.net, and has complete reference material about potential problems and how to fix them. It contained less hype and more fact than I have come to expect from Microsoft. I particularly liked the sections that list the differences between vb6 and vb.net. This is exactly the information that I was looking for and the only place that I have been able to find it. Other notable chapters cover COM Interop, migrating COM+ services and troubleshooting migration problems.
With the help of this book, I have migrated several of my applications to vb.net, a much easier job than a lot of the reports and newsgroups have made it sound.

Vb.net is NOT a whole new language for us developers to learn, I believe it adds a new dimension to the same language ensuring that we as Vb developers will still have a job in 10 years when java users are well and truly obsolete! I recommend this book to everybody moving apps from vb6 to vb.net.

Bring on vb.net Microsoft, I'm ready!