Legacy modernization · Building business software since 1994
We migrate Visual FoxPro, VB6 and legacy WinForms applications to modern .NET — in phases, while your operation keeps running. No 18-month rewrite, no big-bang cutover, no consultant telling you to throw away 20 years of business logic.
Your business rules, screens and reports survive the move. That is the point of doing it in phases.
Does any of this sound familiar
Nobody calls us because the software is ugly. They call because of one of these.
It only runs if the user is a local administrator, so everyone is a local administrator.
The developer who understood it retired, moved on, or passed away — and left no documentation.
It won't install on Windows 11, so one aging PC in the corner has quietly become critical infrastructure.
Two users editing the same record corrupts an index, and the fix is "everyone out, let me reindex."
Your team exports to Excel and re-types the numbers into the tax portal, the bank, or the ERP.
Nobody has compiled it in years. The source code may or may not match the .exe that's actually running.
Every one of those is fixable without discarding the system. The business logic inside that application is an asset — it encodes 20 years of decisions, exceptions and edge cases that no requirements document ever captured. Rewriting from a blank page throws that away and is why most "modernization" projects fail.
Three engagements
Pick the one that matches where you are. Most clients start with the third and move to the first when the budget cycle allows.
The full move off a dead runtime. We map the data model, port the business rules module by module, and keep the old system running in parallel until the new one is proven against real transactions.
Applications stuck on .NET Framework 4.x with DevExpress 12–19, unresizable designer-generated forms, and a build nobody can reproduce. We bring them to current .NET and DevExpress 24 without redesigning what your users already know.
Not ready to migrate, but the tax authority now requires electronic invoicing, or you need the old system to talk to a modern API. We build a middleware layer beside it — your application stays untouched and starts exchanging data properly.
How the work runs
The sequence is the risk control. You can stop after any phase and still own something useful.
We read the code and the data — not a questionnaire. You get a written report: what the system actually does, what's dead, what's dangerous, what can be reused, and a phase-by-phase migration plan with hour estimates. Fixed price. You own the document whether or not you continue with us.
We migrate one real module end to end — usually the one that hurts most, or the one that's easiest to verify. It runs against production data in read-only mode first. This is where you find out whether we can actually do the work, for a price that doesn't hurt if the answer is no.
Module by module, with both systems live and reconciled against each other. Your team keeps working the whole time. Each phase has its own acceptance criteria and its own invoice, so scope and budget stay visible instead of disappearing into one giant milestone.
Source code, database schema, build instructions, deployment scripts and technical documentation — in a repository you control. If you want your own developers to take over, we train them. We'd rather be optional than indispensable.
Pricing
Nobody should sign a six-figure migration contract with a supplier they've never worked with. Start with five days.
5 business days · remote · NDA signed first
3–4 weeks · scoped from the assessment
40 hours · monthly · 3-month minimum
Outside the packages: $95/hour for ad-hoc work, minimum 4 hours. Rush and weekend work is quoted separately, never applied without written approval.
For consultancies and MSPs: we take white-label and subcontracted work under your brand, with partner rates and an NDA that keeps us invisible to your client. Ask for the partner rate sheet.
Terms: prices in USD. 50% on start and 50% on delivery for fixed-price work; retainers billed on the 1st. All intellectual property transfers to you on final payment. We invoice from Panama — a W-8BEN-E is on file and available on request.
Why this shop and not a bigger one
Application Software Panamá has been building business software since 1994 — warehouse and logistics systems for operators in the Colón Free Zone, billing, inventory, payroll and compliance software still in production today. The stack changed over 30 years. The clients mostly didn't.
Representative work
Client names withheld under NDA. Details available on a call.
Hundreds of tables of free-table data, no transactions, index corruption every few weeks, and a receiving process built around a dot-matrix printer. Migrated module by module to C# with a relational database, keeping the operators' keyboard workflow identical so training was almost unnecessary.
Result: no operating days lost during migration · index corruption eliminated · system now maintainable by a standard .NET developer
A working invoicing and inventory application whose interface had become unmaintainable — designer-generated forms nobody could safely edit. Rebuilt on DevExpress 24 with layouts defined in code instead of drag-and-drop, so screens are reviewable, diffable and consistent. Business rules were carried over intact, not reinterpreted.
Result: UI changes went from days to hours · consistent behaviour across every screen · no retraining of end users
A tax authority made electronic invoicing mandatory with a hard deadline. Replacing the client's system in time was impossible. We built a middleware service that reads its data, generates the required signed XML, submits it for real-time authorization and returns the legal document — with an offline queue for connectivity failures.
Result: compliant before the deadline · zero changes to the existing application · migration deferred to a budget cycle that made sense
Questions we get every week
No. Microsoft ended all support for Visual FoxPro 9 in January 2015, and there will be no further versions. Applications built on it still run on current Windows in many cases, but they receive no security patches, no compatibility fixes, and no vendor help when something breaks. Every year the pool of developers who can maintain them gets smaller — which is usually the real reason companies finally act.
No, and we'd advise against it. Big-bang rewrites are how modernization projects die: 18 months of spending with nothing in production, followed by a cutover weekend nobody sleeps through. We migrate module by module with both systems running in parallel and reconciled, so there's no single moment where everything has to work. You can also pause between phases — many clients do, for budget or seasonal reasons.
Common, and not fatal. Compiled Visual FoxPro and VB6 applications can be analysed, and the database plus the running application together reveal most of the business rules. It costs more and takes longer than working from source, and we say so in the assessment rather than discovering it halfway through. In some cases the source can be partially recovered from the executable.
Yes — that's a requirement, not an option. Historical data migrates in full, with a reconciliation report proving record counts and totals match. Reports get rebuilt so they look the same or better, and export to PDF and Excel. If a report has a legal format you must not change, we replicate it exactly.
You do, in full, from final payment. Source code lives in a repository you control from day one — not ours. No license fees to us, no dependency on our continued involvement, no encrypted binaries. Third-party components such as DevExpress are licensed separately and we tell you the cost up front.
Both. A large share of our work comes through consultancies, MSPs and independent consultants who have a legacy client and no legacy specialist. We work under your brand, talk to your client only if you want us to, and sign an NDA that keeps it that way. Partner rates and a rate sheet are available on request.
Panama City, Panama — UTC−5, which overlaps a full business day in the United States, Canada and most of Latin America, and gives a workable morning window for Europe. We work in English and Spanish. The currency is the US dollar, so there's no exchange-rate friction on invoices.
Honest answer: it depends on module count, data volume and code quality, and anyone who quotes a total before reading the code is guessing. That's precisely what the $1,200 assessment exists to answer — you get hour estimates per phase and can decide with numbers instead of a sales pitch. For scale: small single-purpose systems typically land in the low five figures; multi-module ERP-type applications are a multi-phase programme measured in quarters.
Next step
You don't need a specification. Two paragraphs about what the system does and what's forcing the change is enough for us to tell you whether we're the right shop — and if we're not, we'll say so.
Prefer to skip the form? Write directly and mention what the system is built in — that alone tells us most of what we need for a first call.