VB.NET to C# Web Project Conversion

I work for a pretty cool company, on a pretty nifty product team.  When ASP.NET  first came out, the team took part of our application and web-enabled it, standardizing on the VB.NET language.  It made sense at the time, as much of our previous ASP work was VB based.  However, most of our application is written on C++, and the transition to C# from C++ is a much easier transition than from VB.NET.  So, despite our present VB.NET code base, the team is standardizing on the C# language.

We've tossed around the idea of converting our VB.NET code to C#, but it seemed like it would be too much work.  Now, I've seen plenty of C# to VB.NET code translators, but it's pretty rare to see something that goes the other way.

So, I looked around, and I saw a few products out there, mostly in the $200 price range.  It's a pain to put a Purchase Order through for a tool around here, so free was going to be a better price range.

Then I found SharpDevelop.  Now, I've played around with SharpDevelop in the past, but has it ever come a long way since then.  And, most importantly to me, it actually has a built in C#->VB.NET and VB.NET->C# code translators.  And it's free!

So, I download and fire up the IDE, and less than two hours later I've converted thousands of lines of VB.NET code.  Of course, the conversion seemed flawless, but the real test is whether or not the whole thing works.

And it did.  Almost flawlessly, I might add.  There was a bit of manual tweaking, but not much.  I had to hand edit a few files to make some tweaks, but it wasn't difficult.  And, most importantly, I'm not even an ASP.NET guru.

I highly recommend SharpDevelop for anyone looking for automatic code translation.