Modernising your legacy Visual Basic applications using AI
4-5
Industry trends and challenges
6-7
Background
8-9
Drivers for modernisations
10-11
Modernisation strategies
12-15
Evolve Legacy
16-17
Our AI powered Modernisation Approach
18-19
Decipher: Generative AI powered auto documentation
20-21
Benefits of partnering with us
22-23
Customer Case stories
24-25
Pilot offering
Our Authors
John
Bolger
Global Lead for Application Modernisation and Integration
Miguel Vilhena
Technology Principal for Digital, Data and Cloud
Industry trends and challenges
Running and maintaining legacy
Visual Basic applications often creates significant challenges for businesses. Aside from often oppressive costs and lack of available skills on the market, some of the primary issues are the technical and compliance risks associated with managing outdated IT systems and applications that are no longer supported.
50 %
Over half of the surveyed companies list increasing security and improving efficiency as main drivers for the modernisation of their legacy applications and data in 2023. Cost reduction, better integration with modern technologies and increased agility and flexibility are not far behind, being mentioned by nearly 50 percent of the respondents as well.
These vulnerabilities and inefficiencies can result in risks that, if unchecked and exploited, could create financial and reputational risk, ie. systems unavailable due to ransomware or fines imposed due to noncompliance with NIS2.
Beyond technical risks, financial overheads present a major obstacle when maintaining legacy systems. Maintenance often requires dedicated personnel with specialist skills, third-party support, and infrastructure investments. These costs can quickly add up and strain a company’s budget, diverting resources away from more strategic initiatives.
The inability to innovate is another significant hurdle. Legacy applications can limit a company’s ability to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.
60 %
… over two-thirds of businesses still use mainframe or legacy apps for core business operations, and more than 60% rely on them to power customer-facing applications.
Outdated technologies, such as those built on older architectures like Visual Basic, can hinder a business’s transition to cloud-based solutions and modern architectures. This creates a barrier to modernisation and prevents companies from leveraging the power of AI. Until now, updating legacy applications has been costly, time consuming and not without a high degree of risk, leaving some businesses with no option but to manage the status quo.
The intent of this eBook is to outline our innovative, tried and tested approach to a rapid, low cost/low risk legacy application migration methodology with our unique AI-based Visual Basic modernisation framework , the benefits this approach delivers, our customer success stories and how you can engage in our pilot program that delivers modernisation results within five days.
Statista
Forbes (2022)
Visual Basic background
Historical context and evolution
Visual Basic (VB) released in 1991, gained prominence by offering a rapid application development (RAD) environment for Windows, enabling developers to quickly build graphical interfaces and link them to backend data sources.
Despite the evolution of software architecture and the introduction of VB.NET and C#, many businesses continued using classic VB due to the cost, risk, and complexity of rewriting legacy applications.
Use cases for Visual Basic
Visual Basic, particularly VB6, dominated desktop app development in the 1990s and early 2000s, enabling rapid creation of applications linked to backend databases.
Despite significant CPU and memory on the user’s own device or virtual desktop infrastructure, many VB applications remain active due to their stability and integration with business processes leading to significant and undesirable unbudgeted OPEX and CAPEX. They underpin critical operations like finance, logistics, customer management, and reporting, with migration risks keeping them vital for business continuity.
Powering core business systems
While many VB6 applications serve primarily as back-office systems supporting internal users for business operations, a significant number still play a role in customer-facing services.
This is often the result of earlier modernisation strategies where organisations opted to replace only the customer-facing user interfaces while retaining and encapsulating the original VB6 business logic in the back office. These legacy components remain deeply embedded in organisations reflecting the complexity and risk involved in fully replacing them, which has often led businesses to defer full-scale reengineering.
Architectural differences: then vs now
Classic VB applications are monolithic, with tightly coupled UI, business rules, and data access which must be deployed to each end user device, unlike modern, service-based, cloud-deployed systems.
Current architectures use MVC or microservices for scalability and maintainability, optimised for the web with REST APIs and asynchronous processing, presenting significant migration challenges for legacy VB systems.
Drivers for modernisation
There are many reasons for modernising legacy VB systems, which generally relate to reducing risk and cost. However, modernisation ultimately also allows you to leverage new functionalities and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.
• Reduce organisational risk by moving to a supported technology stack
• Reduce hardware and licensing costs (e.g. Citrix or on-prem infrastructure)
• Improve scalability, performance, and user experience
• Improve and optimise business processes constrained by what is allowed by the underlying systems
• Align with cloud-first or digital transformation strategies
• Attract developer talent, as VB skills are increasingly rare
• Decrease technical debt and future-proofing core business systems
Understanding the challenges
Visual Basic modernisation presents a variety of unique technical challenges that require specialised expertise and careful planning to fulfil. Understanding these challenges is essential for developing effective modernisation strategies.
Tightly coupled code that mixes UI and business logic, making it hard to extract and reuse
Changes in architecture making it more difficult to automatically transform to modern architecture
Outdated dependencies and third-party components that lack modern equivalents
Hardware reliance, especially where applications were designed for on-premise servers or ‘thick-client’ PCs
Performance bottlenecks when migrating to web-based platforms, which operate with different resource models and latency considerations
Insufficient knowledge of the system itself, due to original developers no longer being present and lack of adequate documentation
Difficulty comprehending the source code as VB is no longer taught to current generation of software engineers
Size and complexity of the applications that are yet to modernise - over the last 20 years the smaller and simpler VB6 applications will have been modernised, and what’s left currently are the bigger, business critical applications
Modernisation strategies
These strategies are tailored by business need. In our view, a successful modernisation journey starts with understanding the role the application plays in your business.
Customer example: Aligning applications to business needs
In a recent engagement with one of our customers, they maintained a mission critical Visual Basic application with 5.5 million lines of code. As this codebase was too large and too risky to rebuild from scratch, we used automation technology to perform code transformation at scale, automatically converting VB6 to .NET using a combination of 3rd party product and GenAI.
We limited change as part of the conversion process to reduce risk and enable us to quickly address the technology obsolescence issue and deliver the solution in a phased approach. This has enabled a move towards a continuous modernisation agenda once on .NET that allows us to realign the application to business needs.
Modernisation strategies depend on your unique circumstances.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach and every organisation operates within a unique set of constraints; ranging from legacy architecture and technical debt to business priorities, compliance requirements, and in-house capabilities. That’s why we evaluate a spectrum of modernisation strategies tailoring our approach to suit your specific context.
At the core of our process is a relentless focus on delivering business value. Our recommendations are grounded in pragmatism, carefully balancing the need for innovation with continuity and risk management.
This ensures that the modernised application not only leverages modern technologies but also aligns seamlessly with your organisation’s strategic, technical, and operational objectives.
At the core of our process is a relentless focus on delivering business value
Rapid Proof of Concept
With access to source code and data
Version 1 can recreate a screen to demonstrate what modernised application will look like
Evolve or Transform Analysis to examine like-forlike code conversion vs benefits of transformative approach
Options Assessment
Quantitative analysis on success viability and sectoral/technical scan on legacy modernisation options
Decipher & Dead Code Scan
Version 1’s code analysis tool can automatically produce system documentation based on code inspection and identify redundant code
VB Conversion Toolkit
Version 1’s pre-configured suite of tools and methods for converting legacy Visual Basic to modern code base
Patterns & Accelerators
Cloud landing zone blueprints, data models, LLM templates and integration patterns to facilitate legacy transition
Stakeholder Mapping
Identification of technical and business resources that may be impacted through the modernisation journey
Legacy Identification
Scanning & review of application landscape to identify priority legacy candidates
Business Engagement Champion associated and operational
Our Proven Framework
Modular Prototyping
Code conversion trials using range of technologies, including VBUC from the VB Conversion Toolkit
Tech Stack Application modernisation to .NET, C# or alternative technology
Engagement of Business Champion to support any associated change, training operational impact
Supporting Documentation
System documentation drafted by Decipher, finalised by Version 1 engineers
Migration & Archiving
Analysis and incorporation of historic data, user accounts and even regulatory audit logs into the modernised application
Deployment Automation
Cloud, package and test automation of modernised candidate code
Managed Service Ready Code suitable for ongoing support through the Version 1 ASPIRE service
Based on our deep expertise in delivering Visual Basic modernisation programs, we have developed a tried and tested transformation framework which derisks and accelerates your journey.
This framework ensures consideration of the many factors that influence your modernisation strategy.
Our Evolve Legacy Visual Basic framework addresses all stages of the process, ensuring we fully consider and adapt our approach based on your unique circumstances:
This framework includes a combination of our own IP such as our Decipher Generative AI Auto Documentation solution and our Business Value Assessment framework, through to the use of industry leading software that can automate the conversion from Visual Basic to modern .NET solutions, thus highly accelerating delivery.
Foundations
is our tried and tested toolkit we use to perform the modernisation
Pulse
ensures we understand the business context and drivers
Discover
delves into the details of what a transformation might look like
Experiment
enables us to rapidly assess and validate the future state solution
Prioritise
ensures we break the problem down to derisk the process and deliver business value most effectively
Execute
governs how our teams deliver a production ready solution
Our AI powered approach
Generative AI will unleash application modernisation at scale, enabling applications which would previously have cost too much or taken too long to be transformed.
Breakthroughs in the coding capabilities of Large Language Models have enabled this new reality, with AI now automating the tedious and manual intensive conversion process, and accelerating the development cycle, thus driving new levels of efficiencies. Our Visual Basic Modernisation solution employs Generative AI technology throughout the process.
Reduced effort of code conversion by 75% using automation and Generative AI technology Reduce using
Use our Decipher GenAI solution to generate documentation for your existing systems, reducing effort by 80%
Using best of breed AI coding assistants to drive productivity enhancements of development by ~20%
New developments in AI, particularly in gen AI, are radically recalibrating the costs and benefits of modernizing legacy tech and reducing tech debt as part of a larger set of changes in how IT operates.
McKinsey
Reduce test case creation by up to 50% using our GenAI E2E test automation framework
assisted test automation
Accelerating Terraform scripting for environment creation by up to 50%
Decipher: Gen-AI powered auto documentation
Decipher is our Generative AI powered auto documentation solution to generate documentation from source code at scale.
It offers an intuitive interface for analysis and documentation viewing and produces documentation in a developer friendly and editable markdown format, which can be pushed to your source code repository and amended as needed.
Decipher incorporates Visual Basic code analytics capabilities which enables deep insights into your application. It achieves this by plotting classes and functions onto a knowledge graph, whilst capturing the interconnectedness of code.
This drives deep codebase analytics such as call stack analysis, automatic identification of individual business processes with the ability to isolate your most complex processes, obsolete code detection and business domain mapping.
This code analytics capability, coupled with our Generative AI auto documentation capability enables Decipher to drive deep insights into your Visual Basic application thus derisking and accelerating the modernisation journey.
Find out more about Decipher
Benefits of partnering with us
Our unique approach, our credibility, capability and unique IP
Award-winning results
Our National Highways VB6 modernisation earned Microsoft’s 2023 Global Application Modernization Award, demonstrating proven capability at the highest level.
Deep VB expertise
Visual Basic modernisation requires specialised knowledge that’s increasingly rare in the market. Our consulting team combines decades of VB experience with cutting-edge AI capabilities.
Scale-tested methodology
From rapid 3-month rebuilds to 5.5 million line transformations, our approach scales to match project complexity using proven automation combining automated VB Migration Tooling and GenAI technologies.
Cross-sector experience
Public sector, private enterprise, and financial services organisations trust our modernisation expertise across diverse regulatory and operational requirements.
Proprietary AI tools
• Decipher: GenAI-powered documentation generation that automatically maps legacy system logic.
• Custom transformation Gen AI templates: WinForms to Blazor conversion prompt and code templates that recently saved a client 400 development days.
Azure Cloud Native Development accelerator
Best practice accelerator focused on providing an opinionated implementation of Non-Functional Requirements, including Terraform environment creation, Cloud Configuration, DevOps pipelines, starter for ten codebases and a comprehensive test automation suite.
Comprehensive modernisation playbook
Our defined methodology reduces risk through repeatable processes refined across hundreds of successful transformations.
Full-stack capabilities
Beyond code transformation, expertise spans cloud migration, data modernisation, AI integration, and user experience design for complete digital transformation.
Strategic partnerships
Long-standing relationships with Microsoft and other cloud providers unlock funding opportunities and technical resources for your modernisation journey.
Proven track record
Large-scale digital transformation programs consistently deliver measurable value and competitive differentiation for our clients.
User centred design
This approach ensures modernisation focuses on realigning to your needs.
Relentless focus on protecting and driving business value
Safe and secure use of AI
We place the utmost importance on data privacy and security when using AI to modernise your applications.
Our AI partners which include Anthropic and GitHub share this commitment and guarantee that your business data is processed securely, is immediately deleted after use and is never used to train their AI models.
We maintain rigorous governance and oversight of all AI tools, ensuring they meet our stringent security standards. This means you benefit from AI-accelerated modernisation while maintaining complete control over your confidential information. Your data is protected, your IP is secure and your trust is earned through our commitment to the highest standards of AI security.
National Highways Customer case stories
Our partnership with National Highways, included a rebuild of their VB6 app from scratch in 3 months as it was relatively small and self-contained.
We used our Azure Cloud Native Development accelerator as the starting point for this rebuild. Focused on providing a best practice and opinionated implementation of Non-Functional Requirements, this accelerator allowed our team to hit the ground running on the Visual Basic modernisation.
Our accelerator saved between 6-8 weeks of delivery time and ensured a high-quality result. We were able to deliver better outcomes by applying User Centred Design to reimagine business processes.
The benefits of the transformed application included 150% faster reporting of incidents, more efficient incident closing, and a 50% increase in how fast reports can be created.
These results led to improved journey times, easier navigation and ultimately increased safety for every person travelling across these major arteries in England, which carry up to 4 million vehicles a day. Our holistic and business value centred modernisation approach earned us Microsoft’s 2023 Global Application Modernization award.
6-8 weeks
Our accelerator saved between 6-8 weeks of delivery time and ensured a high-quality result.
150 %
The benefits of the transformed application included 150% faster reporting of incidents, more efficient incident closing, and a 50% increase in how fast reports can be created.
National Highways’ NILO reporting is now a faster, more comprehensive service than ever before ensuring road users have a better experience, less stressful journeys and improved journey times when travelling.
Tim Priest, National Operations Team Leader
SCA Containerboard
Our client’s application had 5.5 million lines of code and therefore too large and too risky to rebuild from scratch. In this scenario, we used deterministic rules-based automation, enhanced with Generative AI-assisted code generation, to perform code transformation to .NET and deal with the technology obsolescence.
By following a continuous modernisation agenda once on . NET, it allowed us to realign the application to business needs. Due to the size and criticality of this application, we took an incremental transformation approach, where functionality was migrated module-by-module to reduce risk, with the initial two modernised modules already deployed in production, delivering a state of the art technology system. A ‘best shoring’ delivery model was also utilised to realise cost efficiencies.
“63% decrease in delivery time due to automation”
More resources
For more information on our legacy system modernisation, review the resources below.
Legacy system modernisation
Decipher
Embrace legacy powered analysis modernisation our
Embrace innovation and unleash agility by modernising your legacy systems.
AI powered code analysis and documentation. App modernisation blogs
Review our application modernisation blogging content written by our thought leaders and experts.
Pilot Offering
Prove the value: Your five day VB to .NET pilot
Unlock the potential of your legacy VB6 applications with our low-risk, fixed-time pilot engagement. In just 5 days, we will take a representative slice of your existing codebase and transform it into a modern, maintainable .NET solution using our proven automation-first approach.
This pilot provides a tangible demonstration of the speed, quality, and business value our modernisation process can deliver, helping you build the confidence and clarity needed to move forward with a full transformation.
See the results, validate the approach, and de-risk your modernisation journey, all with minimal upfront investment.
