Easier .NET migration

Mohammed Muzammil Ansari

Migrating to .NET Dhananjay Khatre, Prashant Halari Nararyana Rao Surapaneni Manu Gupta, Meghna Deshpande Publisher: Pearson Education

Migrating to .NET is for programmers who are interested in migrating legacy apps to a new Platform, VS.NET. Developers who are into such migration-related activities not only need a good understanding of the new programming model but also should be aware of pitfalls and workarounds during migration, to leverage the power that this new technology offers.

It is always essential to have a road map prepared by seasoned professionals who have made considerable contributions in this area. A book, which keeps in its core the strategies on the path of migration case studies from different programming languages, does help to make stress-free migration possible.

Migrating to .NET is one such book available on shelves for you, if you are part of migration to VS.net. The book is written in a simple language and can be read on a flight too, if you’re very busy. The book gives a good insight into the Microsoft .NET framework. It does not delve into the details of VB.net, ASP.net and VC++.net though it does talk about a few new features of these .NET languages. Readers, therefore, are expected to be fairly familiar with these languages.

The book primarily talks about the migration approach for VB to VB.net, ASP to ASP.net, and VC++ to VC++.net. The authors have detailed roadmap to migration, factors to be considered and various phases involved in each of these migrations. They also talk about the handling of legacy COM components in .NET and exposing them as Web services.

There are good coding recommendations (with examples) for pre-migration changes. However, the various types of compile errors and warnings that come in upgrade reports have not been covered in detail. It is left to the reader to explore solutions for these errors (when they face them during migration) from .NET documentations.

For post-migration changes, the authors have shown how one can achieve the same functionality using .NET language instead of using legacy code. The book gives a good comparison between ASP and ASP.net at various levels.

As far as dealing with Migrating to .NET is concerned, the book seems to have met its objectives. However, it may appear at some places that a few concepts are repeated, especially COM and interoperability. Also, some of the chapters do seem out of place.

One of the drawbacks of this book is that it does not come with a CD; it would have been great to enable readers to experiment with sample codes, the migration methodologies and workarounds given in this book.

The reviewer works with Geometric Software as a group leader