Converting a VB.NET Project to a C# Project [closed]
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Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this questionI'm looking for a tool (paid or OSS) to convert a mid-sized VB.NET project to a C# project. I've searched StackOverflow and have found a few questions/answers, but most suggest .NET Reflector or online copy/paste single file tools. Reflector doesn't seem to fit the bill as it will convert an assembly, but we're looking for a whole-sale project converter which will maintain the project including file names, comments, etc.
We're fully willing to manually address items that cannot be automatically converted, but would like to start off with a fairly comprehensive converted project.
One recommendation we found is Elegance Technologies' CSharpener for VB.NET - http:/开发者_JAVA技巧/www.elegancetech.com/csvb/csvb.aspx. Based on their site, it hasn't been revved since pre-VS 2008.
Recommendations will be appreciated.
SharpDevelop is an open source IDE and it allows you to covert between VB and C#.
Do be aware that there are some things which can be done nicely in VB.net that cannot be done nicely, if at all in C# (and vice versa). Two of note:
- In vb.net, declaration-initializations (e.g. "Dim Foo As Bar = Whatever") in a derived class occur after the base constructor has run, and can make reference to the object being constructed. In C#, such declaration-initializations occur before the base constructor is run, and cannot reference the object under construction. One could probably move all such initialization to the constructor, but if there are multiple constructors that may require the creation of redundant code.
- In vb.net, a Catch statement may include a condition (e.g. Catch Ex As FancyException When Ex.SomeProperty = 9). In C#, the only way to a achieve a somewhat similar result is to catch an exception and then decide if it meets the necessary criteria, rethrowing if not; this will yield different semantics in a number of ways. Among other things, at the time the When clause is evaluated, Finally statements which will be tripped by the exception will not yet have run, so allowing the state of the system to be captured. Further, if break-on-unhandled-exception is set, and no "When" condition is satisfied, the debugger will break at the location where the original exception occurred. If the exception had been caught and rethrown, the debugger would break at the re-throw.
I would think an IL-to-C# translator might do an okay job of moving initializations to an object's constructors, though that lead to some annoying repetition. I don't think there's any way for C# code to match the semantics of VB.net's exception handling, though.
Two words: A programmer. If you want it to be the most bug free and just work hire a programmer. A quick google turns up http://www.freelancer.com where you can hire a one time programmer.
If you're not satisfied with SharpDevelop, TangibleSolutions will provide support with their converters to ensure your happiness.
SharpDevelop is quite good, but at my company we've found VBConversions to provide a much more complete conversion. It's a commerical app though, but for the time saved over SharpDevelop it was a no-brainer for us.
As a specific example, one thing we found that SharpDevelop didn't convert correctly was VB indexes, which use curvy brackets. It seemed unable to distinguish between indexes and method calls so didn't convert the indexes to square brackets. VBConversions converted them fine. This one thing made it worth its purchase for us.
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