Migrating 1M+ Lines of Code from PowerBuilder to .NET C#

About Our Client

The Client is a management software development company based in the USA.

Challenge

The Client’s software code was written in an out-of date PowerBuilder language. The company faced a shortage of available PowerBuilder resources for maintaining and expanding the existing application, which was crucial for company’s daily operations. Unacceptably high maintenance costs were additional incentives to consider migration to a modern platform. The Client decided to proceed with automated application approach to migration as it was considered the less risky option.

Solution

ScienceSoft was selected as a service provider to carry out this particular migration project. Migration experts converted the source PowerBuilder application into C#.NET. The application was large enough (approx. 1 125 000 lines of code), therefore it was very important to finish all the projects' phases on schedule in order to prevent unexpected system downtime.

As a result, the team completed the work on time and the Client received a scalable and tested application with the same functionality. During migration project the development team encountered some serious technical problems due to architectural differences between the source and target application, all the issues were successfully resolved with ScienceSoft automated migration approach.

Results

The Client successfully deployed the converted .NET C# application at no damage to the system's performance and productivity.

Technologies and Tools

PowerBuilder, Sybase, Microsoft .NET C#, MS SQL Server 2005, T-SQL