Over the last 3 years we’ve been building a state-wide enterprise forest managment system for Michigan. During the main development and stabilization phases, we locked the application at ArcGIS 8.3. However, with the upcoming release of ArcGIS 9.2, version 8.3 will become deprecated. What this means is that ESRI will no longer support a direct upgrade between ArcSDE 8.3 and ArcSDE 9.2. So, it’s time to bring the entire app up to the latest version – 9.1. I thought that I’d try to write about the various steps, how they go, the problems we encounter, and the solutions we use. Hopefully it will be interesting reading…
The first thing to address is the code – since there was a breaking change in ArcObjects between 8.3 and 9.0, all the code must be re-built, using new references the the new libraries (bye-bye esricore!). Now, it’s worth noting that this is a big system. We’ve got 53 VB6 COM dlls, containing 100′s of commands, GUIs, class extensions, user managment, permission managment etc etc, so we were somewhat concerned about the code upgrade.
Happily, we found that the ESRI VB Code Converter did a pretty good job of it. I talked with the developer who did this upgrade, and besides having to work out the build order of the projects because of dependancies, there were very few errors, and it took less than 8 hours to complete. In a few cases, class names need to be fully qualified when dimming them (i.e. IPoint must be esriGeometry.IPoint)
At this point we’ve got the updated 9.1 code on a the beta system in our Citrix farm, and our client is running through the app to check for any bugs we may have missed.
Next: Upgrade ArcSDE, and plan for some schema changes
