July Meeting Announcement: Modernizing Legacy Applications

Date/Time:
Thursday July 1st, 6PM, Polaris Microsoft Office (4th Floor)

Agenda:
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.

Biography:
Mark Juras is founder of Great Migrations LLC, a technology solutions provider that develops industrial-strength software re-engineering tools and provides software migration services. Mark has been an IT professional since 1985. Before forming Great Migrations, Mark was an independent software products vendor/developer, a technical consultant and trainer, and a system architecture manager for a financial services firm. Mark's full bio is here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/markjuras

Sponsors:
Great Migrations (along with our gracious host, Microsoft) will sponsor this month's meeting with pizza and drinks.