Transportation Firm Expands Software with Ispirer Solution

The customer received a modernized application in C#, which is a feature-for-feature equivalent to the original Delphi application. Thus getting the ability to easily maintain and enhance the newly migrated code.

Results

Background

Our customer is a United States-based defense and transportation service corporation with over 6,000 employees. The company offers instrumented air and ground combat training systems, battle command training, and simulation support for military forces. Their transportation division provides intermodal ticketing systems for public transit projects worldwide. The company has business operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Challenge

The customer owns a software suite consisting of multiple Delphi-based applications designed for modeling, optimizing, managing and simulating traffic systems.

The corporation was considering converting their desktop Delphi applications to C# desktop applications. The application migration scope included 537 Delphi source files containing about 600,000 lines of code. The database layer uses the SQLite database and, according to the customer's requirements, it should be preserved in the target architecture. Another requirement was the possibility of expanding the functionality of the new application.

The customer’s team took to the web and began searching for a solution that would meet their requirements.

Solution

After discovering Ispirer Systems, the customer’s team turned to our migration experts to determine what solution would work best for their digital transformation project. As Ispirer has a powerful automation software in place, a variety of application modernization services to offer, backed by in-depth expertise in the migration area, a wide range of possibilities for implementing a Delphi conversion project were considered.

Ispirer advised the customer on the pros and cons of various options and suggested leveraging Ispirer nGLFly Wizard that handles cross-platform application migration. Since the Delphi application used custom controls that have equivalents in Windows Presentation Foundation, it was decided to perform conversion to C# WPF using Ispirer application migration service based on Ispirer automation tools.

The main goal of the Ispirer specialists assigned to the project was to convert custom VCL UI controls for Delphi to target WPF UI controls. The remaining part of the migration was performed automatically using the Ispirer Toolkit.

The project consisted of 2 stages:

During the 8-month conversion stage, the Ispirer team migrated the source application to the target technology stack and worked on tweaking the converted code and checking all the test cases. At this stage, Ispirer presented a preliminary version of the C# application to the customer to get their feedback and approval of the target architecture and user interface. By the end of this stage, Ispirer experts provided a C# WPF version with all test cases passed.

At the acceptance stage, the customer performed user acceptance testing of the target C# WPF application. The Ispirer team fixed all bugs and issues. Once approved, the final version of the C# .NET WPF application was delivered to the customer.

Outcome

With the help of Ispirer's experts, the application modernization from Delphi to C# WPF was completed in 8 months. The project scope included about 600,000 lines of converted Delphi code.

Thanks to a smooth and cost-effective migration from Delphi to C#, the customer managed to optimize their IT budgets, increase productivity, as well as adopt and implement the most innovative business strategies.

With the intimate knowledge of the new C# WPF system gained during the migration process, Ispirer engineers now continue to provide post-migration services, including adding new advanced features and integrating the newly modernized application with the customer's products and systems.