News and Events
COALM Group Meeting -- July 1, 2010
Overview of Presentation
Mark Juras will make a presentation about Legacy Modernization at the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management group meeting this Thursday, July 1 at the Columbus branch office of Microsoft. The content will be of interest to anyone planning a large scale migration effort.
Adapting to technology is an ongoing challenge for all businesses, and
arguably the most challenging type of technology change is switching to a
different development platform. The platform sets the rules and makes your
systems possible; it is major component of developer capability and it binds
IT communities together. However, during the course of a system's
lifespan, its original platform will be displaced by next generation tools
and technologies. Usually, the platform changes happen gradually and with an
appropriate measure of backward compatibility. IT organizations can adapt
through standard maintenance activities. Sometimes, however, the changes are
more radical and disruptive and the effects threaten to crumble the
foundations of your IT organization.
Today, the entire Microsoft Windows development ecosystem is in the midst of
a huge platform migration - from Visual Basic (VB) to .NET. Through the
1990s, VB grew in popularity because it offered a quantum leap in the ease
of graphical client-server and distributed application development. In
2000, there were an estimated 3 million IT professionals developing systems
with VB and approximately 30 billion lines of VB code running in production
systems. Through the 1990s, Visual Basic upgrades had been fairly painless
and inexpensive because Microsoft made new versions of VB backward
compatible. But things changed with the introduction of Microsoft's new
flagship development platform - the .NET platform. An upgrade from VB to
.NET brings with it a radical shift in terms of architecture, design,
deployment, features, and tools.
Confronted with declining vendor and community support and major migration challenges, many organizations are looking for a strategy to move massive business systems and development teams to .NET. They want to minimize disruption and costs and leverage the momentum of the platform change to move their capabilities forward. As system architecture manager for a financial services firm, I faced this challenge. We wanted to move a huge (1.2M LOC) application portfolio from VB to re-engineered .NET and we had to do it without impacting our ongoing commitments to serve the business. After extensive research and analysis of options we discovered a smarter way of modernizing large systems and completed our migration ahead on schedule and under budget. Subsequently, I started a company to refine this solution and offer it to the VB community.
This discussion will present the VB to .NET migration problem and our unique solution. We will finish with a discussion of the challenges of making a business case for migration and the role of legacy code and system analysis and reengineering translation tools.
Meeting Details
COALMG meets on the odd 1st Thursdays of the month (Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, Nov) at 6pm - 8pm on the 4th floor of the Microsoft Offices off Polaris Parkway in Columbus, Ohio. Address: Polaris Center 8800 Lyra Dr., Suite 400 Columbus, OH 43240 Phone: (614) 719-5900