i will probably work for a company that is using a lot of VB6. they are interested in exploring .NET but just not now... they want to do it in 1 year or more. Now, they keep telling me that they will use .NET 'if it makes business sense for them'.... besides
the obvious technological improvements in .NET... i dont really find a way to justify for them to start developing new apps in .NET (migrating legacy VB6 systems doesnt make sense at all it seems -- due to the developing time it will take and the fact that
those VB6 systems are VERY stable) so, do you guys know of any compelling reasons why a very traditional company should venture into .NET instead of using the proven VB6 approach?
"Never argue with an idiot; He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience"
There will be a time when a company will move wagons from an old programming framework to a newer one. Migrating the existing applications because you change the framework is NOT a good enough reason. I good enough reason is a fictional one I am going to create:
Say you program in X... and you hear the news that X is being dropped by the company that invented it... and they will also drop the downloads and redistribution of the framework (like Java or J#). Legally, they bounded your apps with their support time
span and reditributing their framework is illegal when they drop support. It is more like: why re-invent the wheel?
exactly... so why should a 'conservative' company try experimenting with .NET when all their systems are in VB6 and very pretty stable? why would be a good business reason to move to newer technology, even though they are REALLY comfortable with the old one?
"Never argue with an idiot; He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience"
> why would be a good business reason to move to newer technology OK, that should be 'what' not 'why' but anyway - that's almost impossible to answer. different businesses have different needs - we couldn't possibly begin to comment on what a particular company
would consider a compelling reason to move to .NET without an intimate knowledge of said company. j
RTFM - straight talk for web developers. Unmoderated, uncensored, occasionally unreadable
jason, i disagree with you... i am specifically talking about VB6 versus .NET, and there should be a number of generic reasons as to why would it be convenient for a business to abandon VB6 and go to .NET its a pretty concrete question, i do not see it as 'impossible
to answer'
"Never argue with an idiot; He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience"
nope, it's impossible to answer because the decision to migrate, as I keep telling people, should be based oin the relative value to the business, not on purely technological issues. Sure, .NET is 'better' from a developer's standpoint, but does the migration
offer compelling improvements and a decent return on investment? that would depend on exactly the app we're talking about, what sort of business we're dealing with, the time it'd take to perform the migration, security requirements, time that could be saved
adding enhancements, extra cost (if any) of retraining staff, whether upgrades of client or server software may be required and a myriad of other issues. As I always say, a migration has to offer a positive return on investment. If the migration costs $5000,
then the business has to recoup that amount or more solely as a result of the migration if you want to take the narrow view, sure go ahead and answer it, but you'll be missing a lot of factors. And abandoning a curent platform in favour of VB for NEW projects
is of course a different Kettle of Fish entirely. Here there are less issues with the costs of migration but there's still possible retraining, upgrading to VS.NET if you haven't already, time to install .NET on development machines and extra time in keeping
it all nicely patched and secure. Some of these factors won't matter a stuf, others will, depends on the business. it's NOT a concrete question.
RTFM - straight talk for web developers. Unmoderated, uncensored, occasionally unreadable
jason, in my first post I specified: "migrating legacy VB6 systems doesnt make sense at all it seems -- due to the developing time it will take and the fact that those VB6 systems are VERY stable" so, yes, i am not talking about migration. regarding what you
said about new development, i agree with you, there are training costs, purchasing the new development tool, etc. What happens is that I got this offer where they already have all the development software required (MSDN subscriptions, etc), and they are bringing
me in as the '.NET guy' (since I've been working with it since the beta version). However, they want me to focus in mantaining their VB6 systems and very slowly start developing NEW apps (AGAIN, NOT MIGRATING) in .NET. I say 'slowly' because they are very
defensive about new technologies (due to potential instability) , they rather do it in what they already know (VB6) and it sounds to me like i'll have to do a LOT of convincing about the business advantages of developing NEW APPS in .NET. so, again, back to
my original question. what would be some advantages that I could mention in order for them to be more willing to develop in .NET? (new applications only, and keep in mind they already have all the software and network engineers that do all the patching)
"Never argue with an idiot; He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience"
Ever worked with ILDASM? Does your company understand how the framenwork is based on MS machines? Lets begin by looking into the ILDASM and you will notice that a lot of the framework's classes is wrapped around the Window's core. I never got into VB6 alot
(I am fairly new to programming [as a hobby for two years]), but MS claims that .NET is faster than other applications because of the cutting out of the 'middle man' (whatever that layer was -- again, I never got into much detail on that). Whether this is
true or not, OOP is definitely the gain with .NET (irrespective of what language it was programmed in). But my point about the stability - it is wrapped around Windows directly... show it to your boss ;) :P !
javiguillen
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.NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
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jlovell
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
Sep 15, 2003 06:24 PM|LINK
javiguillen
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
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Atrax
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
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Jason Brown - MVP, IIS
javiguillen
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
Sep 16, 2003 02:33 AM|LINK
Atrax
All-Star
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
Sep 16, 2003 04:11 AM|LINK
Jason Brown - MVP, IIS
javiguillen
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
Sep 16, 2003 01:45 PM|LINK
jlovell
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Re: .NET versus 'legacy' apps (even VB6)
Sep 16, 2003 07:02 PM|LINK