Have any vb applications been ported to delphi?

Question

I would like to hear about the experience of classic vb developers who ported their applications to delphi and not to vb.net. How did it happen? Are you glad or sorry that you did not switch to vb.net?

Answer 1

I am not a vb developer, but a Delphi developer who has supported some vb applications for some time. I tried porting one vb application to vb.net, and after this experience I never tried it again. I have successfully migrated several vb applications to Delphi. It was not easy, and at the bottom of the screen it became painful to find my own Delphi replacements for some of the OCX that were used (I will never rely on a third-party library for which I have no source code)., But it turned out OK.

But, as mentioned above: I am an experienced Delphi developer, so I did not need to learn Delphi at the same time as porting the vb application. This certainly made it a lot easier.

Answer 2

I just noticed this on DelphiFeeds :

Delphi for Visual Basic Developers Help Transfer VB Applications (Knowledge and Skills) to Delphi

Answer 3

I had a good friend who switched from Classic VB to Delphi some time ago (before .NET). He was very pleased with this movement.

The company with which he worked in VB applications, assembled a special team (2 developers) to create Active X controls in Delphi for the rest of the company. Also, when there was something they couldn't do in VB, the Delphi team would do it. That was when he was introduced to Delphi.

He said that long before the Delphi team could prototype applications in Delphi faster than the rest of the development team (he never said how big, but maybe more than two). The company never switched to Delphi from VB because someone had the impression that VB was a better solution, despite the fact that Delphi was more powerful and faster.

Answer 4

For several years I have been working with another student in our year of study. We worked for a very large manufacturing company. One of his projects was to create a classic VB application for interacting with multiple cameras on a production line and real-time data analysis. In classic VB, this was crashing - it took an average of 1.5 minutes to process one frame from one camera (7 cameras at a speed of 24 frames per second), which he could not optimize.

In the end, he plunged into Delphi and rewrote this application and works fantastically. Recently I was in contact with several friends who are still working there, and his application has been running smoothly for 3 years.

Answer 5

I worked in both VB and Delphi, and Delphi (IMO) was much less frustrating / limiting. You should be able to use ActiveX / OCX controls as needed (although I agree with other comments: avoid where you can, and if you have the full source code). The applications that we migrated from VB to Delphi (two) went well.

Answer 6

I tried in two instances to switch from VB to Delphi, but, unfortunately, I had to cancel halfway in one application, because it used a lot of third-party ActiveX (most of ComponentOne and several of CodeJoke). We had to interrupt our work halfway, as we could not find VCL components that had equivalent functionality for ActiveX used in the project.

It was a nightmare for us. Thank god we broke off halfway and switched to C #. It is unbelievable that we could get all the features in the .NET component before that!

The application that we managed to convert went well, but we had to get rid of a few functions that we implemented in the original software, since they require more work in Delphi.