Visual Studio - rewrite / extend life
FYI - I am the main mainframe who moved into the .NET world a couple of years ago and has a lot to learn.
We are looking at rewriting a Visual FoxPro application in .Net (most likely VB). This project is designed for 4-6 years.
We are now in the early stages of preliminary design. I see a lot of information from Microsoft on VS 2010. Is there anything wrong since 2005/2008 that we should be concerned about? Or is it an SOP for MS to start promoting future products at an early stage? Should I wait for 2010 to start coding? The functional design probably won't be finished by the end of the year (2009) anyway, and we can always do layouts in VS-2005.
Second, FoxPro and VB6 are in the same boat; not supported but alive at the moment. Moving to .NET smart? VB? FROM#? Will there come a time when MS decides that moving to VS 20xx requires another complete rewrite of legacy code (VB6)? Or could they exclude VB.net or C # .net for the next "great" thing (foxpro)? Or what about the lifespan of the .NET platform? Is it limited until something else comes along?
We have a pretty large app with multi-year groups, updates and legislative changes that will already be converting the PIA. We want a new platform that will be stable for decades to move upward easily. Is there any development code 50 years from now? one hundred?
The main logic of the application hasn't changed that much since they used pen and paper. It is difficult to justify rewriting for many years now if it has to be done every 10-20 years. FoxPro started in 1991, went live in 1999, and should now be rewritten in another language.
Mainframes are simple compared to the fluidity of Win Apps.
Here are some high-level specifications.
- This is for the government office.
- It contains highly sensitive data.
- The web interface is not an option.
- It will only be a MS Windows application.
- Will move from FoxPro tables, possibly to SQL Server 2005/8/10 (whatever)
I know those who work with crystal balls won't answer, but what is the community feel for the likelihood that a programming language will be installed and available / stable for the long term?
Thanks for your feedback on this, I appreciate them.
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Where can I get one of these soft government jobs?
Anyway, yes, Microsoft's SOP announces and showcases OS, dev tools, etc., that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the current tools. Since VS2003 has always been very easy to migrate projects to newer versions of the IDE if you so desire, so start with any version of VS when you're ready to write code.
.NET will change as you write this, but they were really good at backward compatibility with previous versions of the framework, so that's not a problem either.
I would recommend C # over VB.Net if you rewrite it anyway. VB.Net was kind of a group help language to get VB programmers to .Net and is sometimes useful for compatibility, but I don't know why you want to start new development with it.
Well, obviously no one can tell for sure what will happen with all of the latest / greatest things in the future. If you were a Mac OS programmer in the 80s and 90s, you would probably be a little annoyed if not quite in the same boat as VB6 programmers.
.NET and VB.NET/C# is a viable proposition in the long run. They are in a different situation than classic VB and FoxPro because they run in a virtual machine that uses many languages. This way, even if the newer, more popular language is used with .NET targets, your old code will still work.
When you say you want to use a desktop application and not something web-based, that's a concern as Windows Forms (the traditional VB frontend system) doesn't get much attention from Microsoft. It won't go away like I said, but there won't be any improvement in the future. If you are working on a huge immutable application, as you say, this might not be a problem for you.
The .NET alternative UI framework is WPF, which is the most recent. There are questions about the long term viability of this because of its extreme resource use. So far, there is only one significant desktop app that uses it (Microsoft's own WPF design tool Expression Blend) and to convince people that WPF is indeed viable, they made a commitment to use WPF in Visual Studio 2010 for a part a user interface such as an editor.However, I would find it hard to recommend WPF for the application I describe - it's too risky.
As for your question about Visual Studio versions, VS2005 was not very good (burst out the door with some major performance issues). VS2008, however, is a great release and it would be good for you to start a project with it - there is no guarantee that 2010 will be better (or even good due to the WPF factor). Teams usually have been using versions of Visual Studio for a long time (my employer is still using 2003 for some work!) And all versions coexist peacefully on the same machine.
And yes, Microsoft really wants to talk about development tools long before they're available. Apparently the "osbourne effect" doesn't apply to developer tools :)
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I have heart from my partners - there is an engine (team from Ukraine) to convert a VFP application to a dot net that will work with existing DBF files. So - rewrite instead - you just run the converter (one-time convention), and instead of FoxPro applications, you have a net dot. If you'd like more detail, please let me know