Question

I need to port a C/C++ unmanaged project (VS 2008) to C# (preferably .net 3.5).
Are there any conversion-helping
tools; let’s say something
translating the code syntax and
asking you verifications/modifications for each
problematic point (I guess I’m dreaming…)

Where can I find some useful howtos or articles about this translation.
They would be very useful if they contained specific hints like:

extern variables should be set in public static classes

(I don’t know, I’m guessing…)

Please no suggestion like “You can call your c++ dll from .net”, because I know it’s possible, but just I can’t.
Note:

• The C/C++ project uses only STL and
  other basic functions, no 3rd Party
  libraries etc.
• I can’t use it directly or wrapped
  from C# because our company needs to
  mantain/modify the code and we’re extremely
  more skilled in C# than in C++.

Answer 1

It will cost you far more to convert it than to wrap it and pay a freelancer (like me) to help you out by changing the C++ code for you every few months (or every few years) when you need to make a change. There are some mechanical approaches but the bigger issue is that you can never really be sure that the new C# code does exactly what the old C++ code did. I have clients who have tried this and most gave up and threw the work away. The ones who succeeded did it very slowly, like this:

First, you wrap the old library and get your UI or whatever the new code is (web service, whatever) successfully calling the old library. This gets everyone some “bang for the buck” and buys you time to solve the “we can’t maintain our old code” problem. You also develop a comprehensive test suite that proves what the old library does for various edge cases and strange things that only happen in the wild every few years. Over time, you move functionality from the old library into a new C# one and change the calling code to use the new library for that functionality. You move the most volatile parts, the things you change most often, out first. At every stage you run the test cases again to make sure your translation from C++ to C# didn’t mess up the results it calculates. Maybe some of it you never move out, maybe in the end it is all moved. You stop when you feel the risk of being unable to maintain your own library and needing to pay someone to do it for you has dropped below the cost of continuing to translate it.

I recommend you have access to someone with good C++ skills when you start. You will probably run into things that don’t make much sense to you. But you can get the value from the library pretty quickly, and still solve your underlying problem in the long term.