Many months have passed since the last VB Migration Partner release (1.33), but surely we haven't been lazy in the meantime. As a matter of fact, the upcoming version 1.34 is filled with great and exciting new features. Don't let the "minor release number" fool you: this is a major upgrade that will make your migrations easier and faster than ever!
First and foremost, version 1.34 officially includes ADOLibrary, the revolutionary .NET library that makes the transition from ADODB to ADO.NET a child play. A will illustrate all the features of this library in a forthcoming post, but for now let me say that ADOLibrary fully supports forwardonly-readonly server-side cursors and client-side cursors with batch optimistic updates. Unlike other vendors in this market, when we say "fully support" we really mean it! In fact, we support all Connection and Recordset events and even rarely used dynamic properties such as Update Criteria or Unique Table. On top of that, we even offer nearly complete support for server-side SQL Server keyset cursors, a feature that only VB Migration Partner can offer! You must see it to believe!
Next comes the support for all the features of Microsoft VB PowerPacks. Starting with version 1.34 migrated apps can use the Printer, Line, and Shape classes defined in this Microsoft library. Foir the highest compatibility with VB6 printing, in previous version the Printer class and the Print common dialog was implemented by means of a small COM DLL. Now all dependencies on COM can be removed and your migrated projects are fully native .NET apps. (For backward compatibility the PowerPack support must be explicitly enabled.)
We have tremendously improved and optimized graphic operations, by using double-buffering and other expert-level programming techniques. While our competitors have just began to introduce limited support for a few graphic operations, the new release of VB Migration Partner is 8-10x faster than its predecessors. We even support the DrawMode property for Line methods, which means that you can do rubber-banding graphics (something that not even plain GDI+ offers).
If you like forms that load fast and without flickering (who doesn't?), you'll be delighted to take advantage of a new feature of the VB6Form class, which uses an advanced and little-known feature of .NET forms to reduce load time and flickering of forms with tons of controls, that is the kind of forms that abound in VB6 projects and that "standard" .NET apps display so slowly. You don't have to be a Windows Forms guru to use this new feature, though: just set a configuration variable and then forget about it!
We have significantly improved VB6 functional equivalence in just too many areas to mention here. Just an example: you can now read and write binary and random files that contain complexed and nested Type...End Type records, dynamic and static arrays, standard and fixed-length strings, etc. and still preserve full compatibility with VB6 binary files In other words, you can exchange binary data with legacy VB6 apps without any need to convert it. This means saving DAYS of programming if you do the conversion manually or with another conversion tool...
Version 1.34 will be available in a few hours. As usual, existing customers will be automatically notified of the new version the next time they launch VB Migration Partner. For more info about new features, changes and bug fixes, have a look at the VERSION HISTORY.TXT file.