Best thought process for converting a WinCE Program to Android?

[#Michael]

We have an old inventory program on a WinCE 6.1 device that connects back to a AS/400 mainframe. It was designed in VB using Visual Studio 2008. We are beginning the thought process of updating the program to work on a new android inventory scanner running ICS.

Any idea what would be the best and most efficient way of doing the conversion? Is a complete re-write needed or can we use an IDE like netbeans to do a conversion?

[Karl L.]

More than likely you will need to do a complete re-write of the application. If you design it well, the code in Java for Android should be shorter and more maintainable than the equivalent in VB for WinCE. If there is one thing Java excels at IMHO, its ease of use.

Edit: I found a good article by a developer who ported a large WinCE application to Android. While some of the things the author describes may help you, his application was written primarily in C++, not VB.

Edit 2: After extensive searching, I found several solution purporting to convert VB/C# to Java (not the Android variant, but close), but they all seemed to be expensive, incomplete, poor quality, or all of the above. Using an automatic converter seems like an excellent way to produce buggy and unmaintainable code.

[#Michael]

I was just reading through that article. It was a good read.