Resources for a large IT department migrating from VB6 to VB.NET

I am working on a research/recommendation project for a fairly large IT department trying to determine whether we should convert from VB6 to VB.NET. For now, we do not want to consider C#, only VB.NET. I assume this must be a fairly common project in the business world. Are there any resources or examples available on what types of things to include in this project's scope and how to best approach this?
At my company, Wintellect, we are seeing more and more Visual Basic 6 developers just starting to take the plunge into Visual Basic .NET. One of the better places to start is with Microsoft's own Migration portal at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/migrating/default.aspx. There you'll find excellent articles and seminars on moving your architecture and code over to Visual Basic .NET.

When we've worked with our clients on migration, one of the biggest hurdles for most shops are that the traditional Visual Basic 6 developer has never had to work with object oriented programming (OOP) before. Visual Basic 6 had some very rudimentary OOP constructs, but it was nothing compared to the real OOP required by the .NET Framework. By giving the team a good course in OOP design and development, you'll be smoothing out the steepest part of the learning curve. Good luck on your migration!

This was first published in November 2003

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