I’ve got my hands on an old Microsoft J++ project that uses some old Microsoft-specific things from the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (now deprecated and unsupported). It uses additional things from the old Microsoft Java Development Kit, which I can’t find anywhere on the web.
It seems the best route forward is to migrate this project to the latest version of Java, and migrate the J++ .sln solution file to an Eclipse project file.
I’m a bit overwhelmed right now — are there any tools to help ease the migration process? Any tips for doing such a conversion?
I would break this up in multiple steps.
First get this to compile and in Visual J++. You will most likely need to buy a used copy from e.g. Ebay.
A quick search found http://cgi.ebay.com/Visual-J-6-0-Professional-Commercial-Box-561-00176_W0QQitemZ320309632655QQihZ011QQcategoryZ80301QQcmdZViewItem
THen when you can see how this works you can work isolating and refactoring the Microsoftisms into something generically usable. This page illustrates how to make J++ work with a Sun JRE so you can do the initial work there: http://java3d.j3d.org/tutorials/quick_fix/vis_jpp.html
Then you will most likely have a bunch of java files which you can copy-paste into a fresh Java project inside Eclipse.