Few businesses have been immune from the effects of the economic downturn. Cost cutting is essential, but firms still need to invest in critical areas to remain viable. Information Technology (IT) is one such area: though CIOs and IT directors are being charged with doing more with fewer resources and are scrambling to streamline their application development processes.

With so many firms using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6) as their primary development environment, the difficulty in achieving flexibility and cost-effectiveness has been intensified by Microsoft’s announcements regarding termination of support for the VB6 IDE and future support of the VB6 runtime.

Many organizations are choosing to migrate their VB6 development environment to .NET. Some resource-heavy organizations have the internal horsepower and domain expertise to manage the migration of their VB6 application. Many others will offload the burden to an IT service provider or consulting service. Whether the migration is done in-house or outsourced, failure to plan effectively can be devastating to an organization’s viability.

This paper reviews the current migration and modernization solutions for converting valuable software assets from the VB6 platform, as well as 12 tips for handling the migration.