About Visual Basic asked experts at the VSLive Conference in Chicago about VB, .NET, and everything. Here are the answers!

This was a tough one for our experts to agree on. While they all were in favor of VB .NET, there was also a clear recognition of the problems that a company could have in making the upgrade. The most representative answer was given by Dan Appleman. As a successful businessman himself, Dan was all business in answering this question. Although he had high praise for VB .NET, he recommended that anyone faced with this decision look at the bottom line, "Don't switch to .NET until you can see a clear cost/benefit reason."

The strongest statement in favor of a move as soon as possible was given by Keith Franklin, "If you want to throw money away, then develop new applications in VB 6." John Henning agreed with a pretty strong statement of his own, "The superior productivity of the VB .NET environment just can't be passed up."

Our other experts tended to recommend a gradual approach. The primary reason for being cautious was that the move from VB 6 to VB .NET is far from simple. Ken Getz noted VB 6 programmers would need to learn new techniques, "You can get only so far on the techniques you learned in VB 6, but if you write .NET code like you wrote VB 6 code, you won't even begin to take advantage of the power of .NET." And Ken noted that you can't rely on Microsoft's conversion tools to take you to VB .NET either, "The tool is somewhat cranky, and the VB .NET code that pops out the back end isn't very good VB .NET code. It might compile and run someday, with a lot of effort, but it won't take advantage of .NET without rewriting."

Billy Hollis provided a three step analysis to get to VB .NET:

"Step one is to get the staff up to speed on object technologies. Regardless of whether they end up choosing VB .NET, C#, Java, or just about anything else for their next generation development language/platform, object orientation is a must to use any of them effectively."

"Next, they should be looking at interoperability. There's no reason to migrate working, solid VB 6 components - just use them in place via interop. If the code is clean and doesn't need much maintenance, that can allow a much more gradual migration out of the VB 6 world."

"But if the older VB stuff is poor code, or has an obsolete design due to age, then VB 6 shops need to look at a clean break."

Billy warned that expert help will usually be needed, "Only someone who has worked with the .NET Framework for a year or more can help them make optimal design decisions." This could be a tough prescription since VB .NET hasn't been in production much more than a year!