Smoothly Migrating a Legacy Energy Consumption Monitoring Tool from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET

Customer

The Customer is an IT company leading in development and delivery of specialized software for energy producing companies. The software enables monitoring and forecasting energy consumption, optimization of energy production and electricity trading. The Customer's software product is well-known in energy industry across Western and Northern Europe (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands).

Challenge

The Customer had a desktop application written in obsolete Microsoft VB6.0 language on MS SQL Server. The application depended heavily on legacy ActiveX controls for producing charts and presentations, which brought inconveniences to the business. Code architecture and syntax also needed to be improved. The Customer considered automated application migration to .NET platform, but lacked relevant practical experience and asked for a plan.

Solution

After analyzing Customer’s requirements gathered during an onsite visit, ScienceSoft has developed a comprehensive Migration Concept. Our experts created a Technical Design Document that included:

• Robust options for final code improvements.
• Strategies for overcoming potential automated migration problem.
• Detailed migration Process Plan on moving from ActiveX controls for presentation and charts.
• Automated migration Project Plan specifying the exact costs and resources required.

ScienceSoft offered its know-how approach to automated migration, which enables changing code structure, targets specific frameworks and more.

To verify the migration outcome, ScienceSoft’s QA & Testing specialists developed a comprehensive test plan and mostly automated test-cases.

Results

A detailed consulting and well-grounded application migration plan provided by ScienceSoft helped the Customer find the best fitting approach. Our team was thereafter invited to implement the migration project.

Technologies

Active Directory, MS Windows Server 2003, MS SQL Server 2005, SharePoint Server,Workflow Foundation.