We met with a Cincom Smalltalk customer today, ahead of the OOP conference here in Germany. One of the topics that came up was forward migration: from an older version of the product to a newer version. In this case, the customer had been on 7.2 of VisualWorks, and had just completed a move to VisualWorks 7.5. There were some concerns over the ease of migration, mostly surrounding things like namespace changes and behavioral issues. Specifically, in this case, the changes that took place with the Network Clients libraries and Web Services (SOAP).

That raised a question I thought I'd toss out to Smalltalkers in general: what do you think about this topic? Is migrating from an older version of Cincom Smalltalk (VisualWorks or ObjectStudio) harder than you think it should be? If so, could you send us:

• Specific complaints about changes that have affected you
• Specific suggestions for things you think would help

We would love to hear from you on this. We always want to move the products forward, but we don't want to leave people behind!

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