It is no secret that we are not great believers in the art of migration. We have written many an article debating it and with the insight we have acquired into the architecture of DataEase for Windows our recommendation will still go far in developing from fresh and leave old dog lie, rather than storm into a big migration project.

We won't debate the pros and cons here, this was more about how many small fixes in the end make things work.

In 8.1 we did a big job on migration to help DFW 6.x users to move forward when at the same time doing the same for 7.x.

Any of you that has been around through both version would know that the move from 6.x to 7.x was a disaster and that these two version is in may ways complete opposites.

As a lot of you have many good things to say about 6 that doesn't mean that 7 is all bad (mostly bad, but a lot of good ideas too).

But to insure that 7.x stuff should work in 8.x when at the same time 6.x stuff should work was not easy and we had to do a lot of fixes and invent methods of handing bad code/missing code/missing object information/blatant bugs/sloppy work and outright sabotage.

We have never gone as far as recommending migration but we have now come to a point where we recommend that one have trial migration just to see if it works "well enough".

This week we got approach by a customer that bough the first DFW 5.x for Windows and had since never upgraded. He had had so much trouble in this version so when he had managed to work out the problem he blatantly denied upgrading in fear of getting a second round.

So he have been running DFW 5.12 for over 20 years (happily in fact) but now had the problem that he is running out of machines to run it on...

He also needed to upgrade his date machines to install other "modern" software on.

With the knowledge of how versions and upgrades works in DFW we did not have much faith in moving this app forward now, but just for the sport of it we decided ot offer to take a look and hopefully we would be able to move it to 6.x at least, so he could use LegEasy 6 Windows (6.53) and hence run Windows 10 etc.

But no.

Migrating to DFW 6.x was just GPF from one end to the other.

After having deleted a lot of troublesome files we got it started but it GPFed within seconds....

So again just for the fun of it did we decide to run it through the latest DE85 migration tool just to see what would happen.

1. It didn't GPF when we migrated it... GREAT but it reported a lot of problems with dates etc....that is normal.
2. It started up directly.
3. It all worked (not some old files that had been encrypted by Developer) but the rest.

All the menus

All the forms
All the reports.

And we couldn't make it GPF...

So thing are definitely looking up.