I’ve come to the disappointing conclusion that if you are doing anything at all beyond the toy level, the upgrade wizard in VB.NET is probably not going to work. The idea behind the upgrade wizard, if you didn’t know, is that it automagically converts your VB6 project to VB.NET. For me, it didn’t work. Something in my code was causing the conversion program to explode resulting in an “out of memory” error. During all this, I came across a good article on the topic: Need To Upgrade VB 6 to VB.NET? Consider This First!.

I tried again after entirely removing the two forms from the project that were causing the error (a mere 4,451 lines of code — about 25% of my project). This time the conversion finished “successfully”. Of course, without those two forms, the project won’t compile. The upgrade report happily shows 185 errors and 437 warnings. The Visual Studio task list says I have 1,355 tasks to attend to.

Many of the errors are of the class “X was not upgraded.” These are mainly because some property or method I am using is no longer available. I also have a lot of “Couldn’t resolve default property of X” and “X is not supported.” None of my forms layouts came through unscathed. Good grief. Basically (groan), I think it will be faster to simply start a new project in VB.NET, redraw all my forms, and copy over code from the old project as needed.

Of course, we all knew all of this before we moved to VB.NET, didn’t we? This is just another data point supporting the fact that marketing people suck.