Customer job description

"We want to move our Win32 software to the browser using Blazor. We expect to have to rebuild the user interface. What we would like to convert is our business logic. So no UI and no database interactions. ... Luckily (or maybe more than luck ??) is there no low-level code or pointer usage in the business code. ... I counted 1100 units with about 86.000 lines of code. A lot of that code is for the user interface and I don't expect that to be converted."

Walkthrough

The problem with this project was initially to fish out the required code from the total amount of code.

For this purpose three new techniques have been developed:

1. an option of creating a dummy application compiling without VCL and third-party code. In this dummy application, the function bodies remain empty and unknown parameter types are passed as object's.

2. a way to explicitly exclude units that are not to be converted from the translation.

3. A recursive translation, in which, beginning from a selected start unit, exactly those units are translated on which the first unit depends.

The dummy code was only generated in preparation for the final code generation. This code was post-processed once mor using a text transformer project in order to bring the database interactions into the desired C# style. Places where third-party components were used or where GUI calls should appear were initially only output as comments for later manual post-processing.

Customer statement (02/02/2023)

It was very hard to find a good solution for moving from Delphi to c#. After looking for different solutions I found t2t-soft's Delphi2C#. I contacted the owner Detlef. We came to the conclusion that Delphi2C# is a suitable tool to solve the task.
We spend about 6 months translating more than 1000 units. Detlef did most of the work, which I found very pleasing. He knows the material very well and we did not have the time to do it ourselves.

After the project most of the Delphi code compiles as c#. Only low-level code and UI code didn't. But that was what we anticipated.

So, all in all we are very pleased with Delphi2C#.

Henk van der Meer, InnoMeer