I always have fun at browsing our competitors' website, especially when they have to explain which VB6 features they support or don't support, or when they attempt some bold comparisons with THEIR competitors (that is, us!)

For one, I can't help admiring the intentional vagueness that they often use when describing which controls their tool support. To them "supporting a control" is a binary property, it's either TRUE or FALSE.

Just to give you a concrete example, all the VB6-to-.NET conversion tools claim that they support the PictureBox control. Alas, they forget to mention that they

  • don't support the PictureBox as a container
  • don't support graphic methods, double buffering, and custom ScaleMode settings
  • don't support DDE
  • don't support drag-and-drop (neither "classic" nor OLE flavors)
  • don't guarantee that all events are fired or are fired in the correct order
  • ... and counting

As you look at it more closely, the "We support the XXX control" claim is void, unless you explicitly specify which features are supported, which ones aren't, and those that are supported only partially. The devil is the details, as they said, and many customers discover these details only after purchasing the software.

We believe this approach is ethically questionable and for this reason we always made the entire documentation for VB Migration Partner is available online, so no one can get unpleasant surprises AFTER purchasing our software. In addition to the manual we also make available the entire Knowledge Base, which orderly lists all known defects and limitations (and how to work around them). For sure this isn't a common attitude in the world of software, as our customers can attest.

In our quest for the highest transparency, we have prepared a long and detailed document (also in PDF format) that explains all the features as well as all the limitations of VB Migration Partner's support library, including the slightest differences from VB6, and - above all - how to work around them. This information has always been available on our website, but finally our customers have a single document that gathers the information spread in hundreds of different KB articles.

It is a safe bet affirming that all software vendors maintain a list of known issues with their tool, as we do, but you won't find this list available on our competitors' websites.... Too embarassing?