Natural to C# Transformation

Migrating Natural to C#

This white paper explores the key business drivers for making the step from Natural to C#, and how our tools make this transition possible. It explains the benefits of Astadia's migration solution over other approaches and demystifies the migration process with a step-by-step look at the way Natural can be transformed into working, maintainable C# code.

For a detailed and extensive documentation on Natural to C# transformation, please request our Research Paper here.

Why migrate from Natural to C#?

There are many good reasons to make the move from Natural to C#, but the following are the largest concerns for businesses:

• High (and continuously increasing) maintenance and runtime fees for the existing Natural products
• Shrinking availability of Natural developers and lack of interest in Natural from young developers
• Lack of an easy transition path from the mainframe version of Natural to its Linux, Unix, and Windows platform versions

C# offers answers to all of the above concerns:

• Maintenance and support fees are negligible when compared to Natural (or even nonexistent depending on the choices made);
• Even though there is no one universally accepted barometer to measure the popularity of the various programming languages, there is no denying that C# is considered to be one of the most widely-used programming languages today. In addition, the design of C# aims for programmer portability, for the vast range of developers familiar with C, C++, and Java;
• Even though C# has been developed by Microsoft, the product and its documentation are publicly available on the Internet (the first versions were even ISO/IEC and ECMA standards). For example, the language specification is available on the Microsoft website here. 

Next to that, moving to C# also means:

• Enabling the use of a state-of-the-art IDE, with extensive debugging, refactoring, profiling and (unit)testing support.
• Enabling the use of thousands of (third-party) libraries, covering almost all imaginable computing needs: database interaction, mail/ftp/http/… communication, parsing, xml processing, …
• Enabling the use of modern application architectures including the use of an application server, web front‑ends, SOA, cloud-deployment, …

Get a copy of our white paper and contact our team to learn more.