Migration to Visual Studio?!

[perlfan]

Hi there - with the release of Visual Studio Community Edition I'm thinking about migrating my Access App to Visual Studio VB.NET. I believe it would make the application more stable (less dependent from Access) - of course there are many other reasons.

I'm interested to hear about experiences from those who already managed the migration and could give me some advice. Would you recommend the change? How did you proceed?
Did anybody use tools for conversion? Which are recommended?

Thanks for your input - FRANK

 

[spikepl]

more stable

of course there are many other reasons.

We have no means of guessing what the above means. If you want feedback on your arguments or concerns you must state them.

I'm not aware of any successful tools for migrating Access to VB.NET, but these things change by the day and I'm not current. VB.NET is a much larger language than VBA and the entire VB.NET environment offers many more features than VBA. Access has many things pre-packaged - you'll discover which by missing any similar things in VB.NET. But such things would not deter an experienced programmer.

If you have a career in developing then VB.NET would be a natural next step giving many more freedoms than VBA. But there is complexity and a learning curve, so if you only develop as a side activity, do not embark on this unless you are willing to invest the time. I can recommend WROX books on learning VB.NET

 

[perlfan]

With "more stable" I meant that with my Access app there are always new errors resulting from incompatibilities between the app/Runtime, different MS Office versions and OS installed on the users's machines etc. In addition, Microsoft seems to focus more on VS so it's more like that new releases, features etc. will follow for VS than for Access. Plus it seems easier to adapt VS apps for online use.
I'd copy & paste and adapt the code, but I thought there might be converters for forms as all the designing is quite a lot of work...besides adapting the code of course.

 

[spikepl]

I think you have drawn some unwarranted conclusions.


Access addresses needs not met by VB.NET. Also, I have not seen any indication that Access will not be supported.

"Easier to adapt VS apps" for online use. There is no such thing as VS-apps. VS is a tool that can be used for creating stuff in (or a mix of) VB.NET, C#.NET, C++.NET, ASP.NET, plug-ins for Office and so on.

For web, that is another learning curve right there, because ASP.NET (which can use VB.NET bits and pieces) has a bunch of concepts that are unfamiliar to people used to things like Access and VB.net, such as various caches, fire-and-forget, view state and postbacks.

"I thought there might be converters" - so did I. Did you actually check?

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

There was a tool for converting MS Access into a web based system I saw a while back that was very good. I'm not sure what happened to it. I think it was called "Swift" and it was created by Andrew Crouch