Contents tagged with migration
-
Transposition - the success story of VB6 migration
Since all of you VB developers in the present or past would probably find it hard to believe that the old VB code can be migrated and modernized into the latest .NET based HTML5 without having to rewrite the application I am feeling I need to write another post on our migration solution. Hopefully, after reading this and the previous post you will be able to understand the different approach of our solution which already helps organizations around the world move away from the constraints of VB6 and free them to access the applications from any computer or browser-supported devices. I will write on such organization later in this post.
-
A Visual Studio tool eliminating the need to rewrite for web and mobile
We have already covered the BYOD requirements that an application developer is faced with, in an earlier blog entry (How to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to a .NET application). In that entry we emphasized the fact that application developers will need to prepare their applications for serving multiple types of devices on multiple platforms, ranging from the smallest mobile devices up to and beyond the largest desktop devices.
The experts prediction is that in the near future we will see that the majority of all applications developed, will need to be able to service these multiple platforms and devices in one way or the other, in order to survive.
Where does that leave our legacy single-platform targeted desktop applications, in which we have even invested decades of manpower?
We could build a User Interface front-end for those legacy applications, still running the legacy application as a back-end. That does in some cases require considerable effort, and it doesn't change the fact that the back-end is still running the legacy, and potentially obsoleted technology, code. On top of that, we will have two tiers to manage, the back-end and the new front-end.
We could rewrite or convert the legacy application for the new technology. For that there are multiple code conversion tools out there on the market that will assist you and make your conversion process a bit easier than to do it all "by hand". All the current tools in this category have one thing in common though, they do code conversion for you, and some of them even pretty well. You will still need to rewrite or reconstruct the parts of code where there is no corresponding library on the target platform.
We could migrate the legacy application to the new technology using any of the migration solutions available. The currently available solution base their migration on a fixed set of black-box built-in rules with no (or very limited) ability to adapt to your special migration needs. In many cases this will only help with the migration of a portion of your code, still requiring rewriting or reconstruction of considerable percentage of your code.
Taking on such a conversion or migration task means that you will use the code conversion/migration tool of your choice to convert/migrate your code. You will most likely have huge sections of code that need to be rewritten and/or reconstructed because there is no direct correspondence between the libraries used on the legacy application and the ones on your new platform. As soon as you start the conversion process, you will be converting the legacy application version that is current at that time, which can present major additional efforts in both management and coding if you need to continue maintaining the legacy application after you have started the conversion process.
What you really need here is a conversion tool that "knows" more about your legacy source application platform and the target platform and "knows" how to "map" between the two whenever possible. In addition, you often may need to continue development on the legacy application while you are converting/migrating. What you need is to lift that requirement and not freeze the development of the legacy application.
Based on these needs, Gizmox's built its solution and called the action transposition rather than migration or conversion. The Transposition studio is a rule based migration and modernization solution. It comes with built-in rules that will automatically handle about 95% of the conversion right out of the box. In some cases it will be able to migrate all your code. In other cases there will be portions that you need to work on yourself, but the entire work is done within the Transposition studio which is integrated into Visual Studio and offers you wizards and guiding tools to minimize risk and required resources.
What distinguishes the Transposition from other migration solutions are mainly three things:
First, it's migration rules are fully open and adjustable so you can change the default migration at will and thereby gradually adapting it to your own specific needs. It uses a very powerful pattern matching engine along with equally powerful template engine that enables you to make very advanced and complex conversions on small and large code segments, all by defining a set of rules and templates within the Transposition studio itself. The Transposition Studio integrates directly into the Visual Studio development environment and you have the legacy source code right at your fingertips and also allows you to override the defined rules by directly customizing parts of the code according to your needs. The rules and templates are stored in user definable libraries, where you can build multiple sets of related rules, which can then be used for, or shared with, other migration projects.
Second, there is no need to freeze development on the legacy source application, so you can continue developing your old application, while you are transposing. Using traditional migration/conversion procedures, you do a one time migration/conversion of the code, and then you start reconstructing/rewriting the parts of the outcome where necessary. This is completely different in Gizmox's Transposition studio. The majority of the required work is spent on defining migration rules and templates within the Transposition studio itself and then you simply re-run the transposition (migration) process to produce a new set of target code. You re-run the transposition as often as you need/like and it is only at the last stage, when you have migrated everything that can be migrated, that you start working directly on the target platform code.
Third, one of the target platform options is a cloud enabled and mobile enabled ASP.NET application with HTML5 front end (based on the Visual WebGui framework) which will fulfill the BYOD requirement of modern applications perfectly. -
Migration & Modernization: Windows/VB6 Apps to ASP.NET HTML5
I would like to invite you to a webinar we are doing in collaboration with Jeffrey S. Hammond, Principal Analyst serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals at Forrester Research.
The webinar is free and it will will introduce the substantial changes brought on by the move to Web Applications and Open Web architectures, and the challenges it places on application development shops. We’ll also introduce how we at Gizmox are helping client navigate this mobile shift and evolve existing Windows applications with a new set of Transposition tools called Instant CloudMove. We will discuss the alternatives in the market to evolve your existing applications and focus on our transposition tools that reduce migration risk, minimize costs, and accelerate your time to market. -
WPC 2011: Move your mission-critical/Enterprise apps to the Cloud
Come and visit us tomorrow at WPC LA 2011 and learn how to move your mission-critical/Enterprise apps to the Win Azure Cloud.
Tomorrow (July 13) at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) we'll be presenting our innovative migration solution Instant CloudMove. We’ll be showcasing (at the Windows Azure Building Blocks demo station) the unique tools for moving business client/server applications such as é.VISOR by Limón GmbH to Azure Cloud. The original application is a data-centric energy monitoring system developed as Client/Server Windows Forms with Access DB. We’ll explain how we moved the desktop application to Win Azure with Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove technology within 1 month whilst maintaining all exiting functionalities and user experience.
This will take place at 1:15-3:30 PM PDT at the Windows Azure Building Blocks demo station, located in the front of the Windows Azure booth. We’ll have our own station which will be located under the monitors which display “Building Blocks in the Public Cloud” -
Transformation of Client/Server application to Windows Azure
The economics of IT is changing rapidly, and organizations are searching to widen and secure availability of their systems and at the same time lower costs. The cloud concept was introduced to allow an IT consumption model where there is always as much computing power as needed when needed ('on-demand') and without having to invest in connectivity, servers, database access, storage space, CPU power and other infrastructure needs, just as we consume electricity.
-
Academy Webcast: Moving C/S applications to Windows Azure
The Cloud and SaaS models are changing the face of enterprise IT in terms of economics, scalability and accessibility. As I wrote before Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove transforms your Client / Server application code to run natively as .NET on Windows Azure and enables your Azure Client / Server application to have a secured-by-design plain Web or Mobile browser based accessibility.
-
How Visual WebGui helps ASP.NET Cloud-based apps
Everyone is talking about Cloud computing and moving to the cloud (public or private), but very few have actually done it so far. The reason is that the process of migrating existing applications to the cloud is a lot more complicated than one might think which is exactly where the Visual WebGui technology comes in for a rescue.
In the past year the Visual WebGui R&D Team have been intensively working on a tool-based solution that gives Microsoft application developers and enterprises a simpler way to migrate Client-Server applications to the Cloud based on ASP.NET. And now we are proud to present the Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove, which is the only solution that transforms desktop applications’ code to the cloud, in addition to web and mobile deployments.
To learn more, you can check out our announcement or read this White Paper. -
New tool helps modernizing Client/Server apps to VWG ASP.NET
Upgrading a Client/Server desktop based application to ASP.NET Web or Cloud based environment is thought to be a very complex and risky process. Most of us are intimidated only by the thought of taking one of our large, business applications; one that we have been working on for quite a while now, not to say mission critical and migratie it to a differernt technology. Most of us will follow the good old saying: If it ain't broken why fix it, right?! Which means that we will eventually find our selves with a very large and old system which the only possible solution for modernizing it would be the costly rewrite that we probably cannot afford or don't have the tme to wait for.
-
Cloud application platform allows enterprise app on Windows Azure
Due to Visual WebGui cloud application platform, developers can now deploy their applications to Windows Azure with the click of a button with no re-writes or new programming skills needed.
-
Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Application Platform 6.3.12 Released
Visual WebGui version 6.3.12 was released today as a further stabilization on the way to 6.4.