Mobilize.Net is a leading software migration specialist. Founded in 1993, the company’s pioneering automatic migration solutions enable enterprises to move legacy systems to modern, scalable platforms such as web, mobile, cloud and .NET. Based on artificial intelligence, Mobilize.Net's proven cost-effective, rapid and secure technology has successfully migrated thousands of enterprise applications and billions of lines of code.

Any monolithic information system that is too difficult and expensive to modify to meet new and changing business requirements.

Your line of business applications, critical to your business processes, can no longer keep up with the latest technologies because they were developed on legacy systems and legacy languages.

The applications are often the backbone of your business, a very valuable asset, but they have become increasingly costly and difficult to maintain. Worst of all, within their current technological framework, it is nearly impossible to fully adapt them to your modern day needs.

Licensing fees, lack of enough qualified support, rigid development environments, lack of integration with other applications, inaccessibility and inability to work on the web makes them a bottleneck for your business development.  Mobilize.Net's unique technology automatically migrates the code to an advanced environment of your choice. You can then derive further benefits from your investment and evolve your systems.

Instead of manually rewriting each line of code Mobilize.Net's technology automates the whole process with minimal human intervention by breaking up a legacy system’s business knowledge into components accessible through modern industry-standard protocols. Our approach is proven to produce functionally equivalent systems at less than 5% of the cost of rewriting the original application.

Alternatively, you can rewrite from scratch and create a new system on the new platform. However, the failure rate for manual rewrites is very high (up to 80% according to Standish Group) and is time consuming and costly.

This term means that the converted application’s functionality is identical to the original application. This eases the transition to a more modern development environment as you are now able to add new features to your application.

Through its pioneering automatic software migration technology, Mobilize.Net employs grammar-based reasoning to optimize the application. At the core of Mobilize.Net's solution is Artificial Intelligence technology that creates a full abstraction of the original program via intermediate representations in which millions of transformations are applied to produce another abstraction in the target language. The new source code is then generated from that abstraction. At each processing stage, the system cleans up the logic, derives useful information from it, deduces its new best representational form and passes it on to the next stage.

Mobilize.Net's technology automatically migrates more than 95% of the source code to your preferred target language. The reason why functional equivalence falls short of reaching 100% with the automation technology is due to the following two factors: first of all, the paradigm shift between the two languages, and the dependency of the applications developed in one language on the platform where they are executed.

The second reason has to do with the knowledge or work that has to be developed or provided by human beings. A clear example of this occurs at the stage where the system is tested. These tests cannot be carried automatically without any user intervention. The users are the only ones who know how the system behaves and what the results that the system produces should be like.

Yes, depending on what exactly you need to achieve, you can choose among: screen scrapers, legacy wrapping, packaged software and rewriting from scratch.

For a thorough discussion on this subject, please refer to the following article:

• Fast Track to Software Modernization 

• Complete Evaluation of the Project: Mobilize.Net carefully analyzes the entire system in the source language. Once this evaluation phase is over, Mobilize.Net provides you with a detailed migration plan that outlines technical issues, risk mitigations and the overall complexity of the migration project. This is what we call the Migration Blueprint program.
• Code Migration: Mobilize.Net converts your source application to a modern platform of your choice such as web, mobile cloud, Java or .NET.
• Testing: The application undergoes a series of tests to ensure it is functionally equivalent to the original application. It is important to have a series of test cases for this migration stage.
• Debugging/Coding. Any problem found during the testing stage is corrected here.
• Finished migration: You will be delivered a revamped application equivalent to your original application. Now you can take the updated application and take advantage of all the features the new platform offers.
• Enhanced application / new functionality: You can now take advantage of the power of the new programming language and third-party tools and libraries to add functionality to the new migrated application.

Mobilize.Net has developed tools and a methodology to analyze the scope and the complexity of your migration project. The information we gather enables us to provide you with an efficient cost and time estimate of your project (if you want us to perform the whole migration for you) and a detailed migration plan. This is what we call the Migration Blueprint program.

Yes, gladly. We have successfully migrated thousands of projects and billions of code lines. Check out our case studies section, or contact us for more information.

There are several drivers for a VB to .NET migration:

• Integrate Windows, Web, Office and Mobile solutions
• Boost system performance
• Ease deployment
• Improve the maintenance of an application
• Increase developer productivity
• Consolidate your company's valuable software assets
• Avoid obsolescence of outdated software (support for VB 6 ended on April 8th, 2008 ).
• Maintain competitive advantage

The decision can be justified by many factors, like technological constraints, legal/regulatory compliance requirements and lack of resources for older languages, all of which decrease an organization’s agility, boost operating costs and tend to destabilize its competitive position.

VB.NET and C# are Object Oriented programming languages, with full functionality for inheritance, interfaces, patterns and more inherent object oriented constructions and behavior. The existence of the .NET framework allows the use of types, libraries and more in both languages, which means that any programmer can read and write source code from any of these two languages without major issues, and the performance is the same thanks to the CLR (Common Language Runtime) environment.

There are differences between both languages that you should analyze. For example, if most of your developers have been working with VB 6.0 they will probably feel more comfortable moving to VB.NET. On the other hand, if you have a Java or C++ code base coexisting with your VB applications, it might be better to migrate your VB6 systems to C#, a language that is more familiar to programmers exposed to other object oriented languages due to its syntax, constructions and usability.

Also, if you are considering web enabling your application or moving into the cloud at some point, we currently have a solution that migrates from C# to Web using Angular and ASP.Net Core, choosing C# will provide you with more more options in the future.

We’ve heard suggestions that a double path approach is best for those who choose to migrate their VB6 applications to C#. This suggestion comes from those who offer a solution that only converts to VB.NET, and they say it’s irrational to even think about jumping from VB6 to any .NET language other than VB.NET. At Mobilize.Net, we know this advice is wrong and have proven it wrong hundreds of times.

The differences between Visual Basic 6.0 and any .NET framework compliant language is noticeable, since the former is a procedure intensive, non structured programming language which its strongest feature was the “visual” designer used to build the graphical user interface, while the latter languages are fully object oriented.

The differences between VB6 and C# or VB.NET are estimated and resolved in most scenarios by the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion tool. To be more specific, let’s use a VB6 inherent feature, which is also present in VB.NET by the way: the “OnError Goto” construct, an unstructured error handling technique to jump to a specified code segment, and “OnError Resume Next”, used to continue with the next instruction in the source code in case there is an error. Both structures make more complex the path tracking for the application control during runtime, and complicate the debugging process and increases the time needed for the application maintenance because of its complexity and lack of readability.

The VBUC is able to remove this error handling routines in the generated source code, ensuring the resulting source code will behave as much as object oriented as possible. The routine used to replace these structures is the “Try … Catch” blocks, simplifying the application flow path by having a managed interception of each error (exception). The “On Error GoTo” and “ResumeNext” constructs are not one-to-one equivalents with the “Try … Catch” block, but it is the simplest way to manage error occurrences without creating the same complexity effect found in the VB6 intrinsic routines.

The upgrade process from VB6 to C# is easier with the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion because of the considerations taken to ensure the resulting code’s quality will be the highest. Some of these considerations are strict typing, event declaration and invocation, error handling, refactoring from modules to classes, parameter transmission, arrays with lower bounds to zero, array dims and redims, default instances for forms, classes and user controls, indexer properties, “with” replacement for full naming, usage of return statements, interface creation for implemented classes, variable initialization, brackets and case sensitiveness refactoring, and more. After a deep analysis of the original source code, the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion is able to perform all the refactoring and transformations needed to accomplish all the previously listed items, delivering the greatest levels of automation and taking the VB6 to .NET migration to higher levels of excellence.

All the Visual Basic 6 inherited features in VB.NET which C# lacks can be modeled with different constructions to accomplish functional equivalence. Using those alternate constructions the code will look more C# native instead of a bizarre adaptation from two extremely different programming paradigms.

All this means that a VB6 to VB.NET upgrade will consume the same effort as migrating to C#. The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion’s architecture allows the C# generation to be done directly from the analysis over the original VB6 source code, allowing the upgrade process to be done in one strike.

This one-step migration avoids the use of third party tools to do the final step from VB.NET to C# because the resulting code is built directly into C# and not in a VB.NET intermediate representation. A two-step migration will ruin the overall precision of the upgrade task because two different tools may differ in the code refactoring techniques, resulting in poor source code quality with almost no readability.

Mobilize.Net has successfully upgraded billions of lines of code from VB6 to C#, and counting more everyday. Based on this experience we can assure you that a VB6 to C# migration is possible, reliable, and in fact, one of the most popular choices among large real world organizations.