In my experience, the answer to this depends a lot on the project. In general though I usually recommend people move up slowly. First open it in the latest version of Automation Studio 3. Then open in AS 4.2. Then try 4.12. Those have seemed to be the biggest leaps. At each step, you’ll probably get errors when you open as well as when you build and you’ll want to address all of these at each step of the way. Definitely use version control so that you can save/revert your edits!
Here are some issues I’ve run into in the past:
- If this project has motion in it, that will probably be the biggest hurdle because some of those errors can be complicated. Depending on how the code was written, you may decide that while you’re at it, you could upgrade to mappMotion or at least MpAxisBasic. But this isn’t necessary if it works as-is.
- Another thing to look out for is outdated libraries that no longer exist in newer AS versions, or do not have binaries available for newer targets (i.e. ARM devices).
- Look out for hardware that doesn’t have an AS 4.x update version available as this will necessitate hardware changes
- There are sometimes errors when transitioning from legacy mapp to mapp Services. To fix these you can often just remove and re-add the libraries. However, you may also have to move configuration files around and/or adjust the information within them as the format of the mapp config files has changed over time.
And finally, test thoroughly, even if the project builds and transfers successfully!