Migrate VB.NET to ROR

Rails
1

Hi,
We are currently hitting among ourselves to see if there is migration
tool/process in place to convert a VB.NET code base into ROR.
Essentially, our product is currently a desktop version and one of the
options for us is to adapt ASP.NET. However, we wanted something more
elegant - ROR. Any thoughts, rants, suggestions would be GREATLY
appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Peace,

Shree

2

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 6:17 AM, GeoKid [email protected]
wrote:

Hi,
We are currently hitting among ourselves to see if there is migration
tool/process in place to convert a VB.NET code base into ROR.
Essentially, our product is currently a desktop version and one of the
options for us is to adapt ASP.NET. However, we wanted something more
elegant - ROR. Any thoughts, rants, suggestions would be GREATLY
appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hi Shrikanth,

The answer to this is no, because RoR uses a convention that you must
follow in order to develop web apps, whereas in your VB.NET
application you follow your own convention. The only way to convert
your VB.NET project to RoR is to rewrite your code by hand using RoR’s
conventions. There isn’t really I straight way of converting VB.NET
projects to RoR, because you can have two developers develop two
VB.NET applications using two different conventions.

What you could probably do (I have never done this) is try to map RoR
models to your legacy database.

Maybe others with more experience can give you some hints as well.

Good luck!

Fidel.

3

Hello–

On May 11, 2009, at 10:17 PM, GeoKid wrote:

Hi,
We are currently hitting among ourselves to see if there is migration
tool/process in place to convert a VB.NET code base into ROR.
Essentially, our product is currently a desktop version and one of the
options for us is to adapt ASP.NET. However, we wanted something more
elegant - ROR. Any thoughts, rants, suggestions would be GREATLY
appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I don’t know how this will work for you, but if I were doing this, I
would sit down with the existing app and write cucumber stories
(http://cukes.info/
) that describe it and implement to make the scenarios pass. What that
implies is that you will:

  1. Install rails
  2. Create a rails project
  3. Install rspec and cucumber gems
  4. Learn as you go how to use them

As far as I know there is no VB2Rails tool. But the benefit of
creating the acceptance scenarios in cucumber and implementing to make
them work is you wind up with a really good set of tests that will
help keep your app stable. I’d also recommend reading the rSpec Book
(Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers
), currently in beta.

The test-first religion is an opinion shared by many in the Ruby
community. Your mileage may vary.

Hope this is useful info.

4

If the application was already an ASP.Net MVC app, then somebody could
develop an MVC->RoR tool a bit more easily.
However, you have a VB.Net desktop application. I don’t believe there
is a tool that will convert it to an ASP.Net application either.

The best bet is to follow a BDD/TDD process (as a previous poster
recommended), regardless of whether you choose ASP.Net or RoR.