While there have been a lot of changes between VW 2.5.2 and VW 7.3, upgrades aren't that tough. The main areas to investigate are:
- Polling User Interfaces. While we had introduced events into VW 2.5, most developers stayed with polling. If you only use widgets that shipped with VW, this is a non-issue. If you have custom widgets, you'll have to update them. This is straightforward and documented.
- Help Files - if you have added your own online help files, see the instructions here
- Threaded UI. If you have code that makes assumptions about there only being one UI thread, you'll have to change it. This is typically not an issue, but you can look in class BlockClosure at the #uiEventNow method (and friends) for options.
- Source Code Management. If you have been using ENVY, you'll need to migrate to Store. We have a migration tool that will convert Envy Applications into Store packages - check the Store documentation for details.
- Parcels - if you used VW 2.5.x parcels, those were based on BOSS. The parcels in VW 3 and up are different - you'll need to recreate any parcels you use.
- BOSS File migration - check the migration tools and tips here
- Deployment - ImageMaker is obsolete, and we now ship RuntimePackager. This was a third party tool, but is now included. There is extensive documentation on its usage.
There have been numerous updates to the development tools - the browsers, inspectors, etc. The documentation explains how to use all of the tools quite well, and the tools are designed to be more obvious than their predecessors. Moving from the old tools to the new ones is a development only issue as well.
If you need specific details on what's been changed in code, the following links provide the necessary information:
A note on methodology: I started with a VW 2.5.2 image, into which I loaded the Oracle connect, the event code, DLLCC, and the socket code. I combined the source/changes file so that I had something to compare. I then fired up a baseline VW 7.3 image, and loaded BOSS, UIPainter, Oracle Connect, and DLLCC. I then used this script to generate the change files listed above.
Questions? Feel free to send them to me.