Migrating from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET

The migration from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET has been covered in many introductory texts on Visual Basic, so this section will not cover the basics. Instead, we will focus on deciding when it makes sense to move a Web Service based on the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit (STK) to Visual Basic .NET.

After doing a lot of work with the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit and .NET Web Services, I have come up with only one hard rule that tells me when to migrate the Web Service. If the Web Service needs to handle a good number of complex types, you will find that your time is better spent migrating the code to .NET. As a developer, you will want to get comfortable with .NET at some point in time, and your purchase of this book shows that you want to start writing for .NET now. The other reason to go with .NET instead of the STK is because writing custom type mappers and getting the WSDL and WSML files correct takes time and experience. Those of you who are just starting to write Web Services will want to lobby for .NET as a part of the overall solution.

If you must stay with Visual Basic 6 for practical reasons (boss mandates it, no experience with .NET, and so on), stick with it and get the code working. As Chapter 10 shows, you can do anything you need to do with the STK. It just takes more time—more time to write, deploy, and test. This is experience talking here.