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The above title should have been enough to make most readers switch off. But for those who are still reading, this is a geeky post about Microsoft development tools. Everyone skipped to something more interesting? Good.
One of the Microsoft mailing lists I subscribe to included an article about upgrading from VB6 to VB.Net. It talks about how good it is, how easy it for VB6 developers to pick up, and how good the tools for migrating old applications are.
Unfortunately it misses the point.
I have been developing in VB.Net for nearly two years, and there are a lot of good things about it. But no matter how good it is, you can't escape the fact that there are some fairly significant changes to the language. There are tools which will run through old code and try to fix it up for VB.Net, and the do work quite well. But the code still needs to be reviewed by a developer, and oc course it needs to be fully retested.
Now if an application is undergoing a major upgrade, this work might be justified. However, many companies will have large applications which were written years ago, and which do what they're supposed to. I occasionally have to deal with several applications within our company which contain over a million lines of code. Updates tend to be minor, but they do take place from time to time. To convert such a system to VB.Net would be career suicide. You would be trying up sevelopment and testing staff for six months or more on a project to convert an existing system (the developers of which have probably left the company) that works into a new system, which will almost certainly introduce all kinds of bugs and problems, requiring more time to fix, but delivering no benefits. No manager in their right mind would approve such a project.
You could argue that there would be benefits in the long term, but the fact is that IT departments are always overstretched and don't have time to go looking for unnecessary projects.
Microsoft are panicking because primary support for VB6 is due to end next year, and they would love to cut it loose. But they know that there are too many people using it to do that. It will be like NT4, with extension after extension to the support. In the future, VB6 developers will become like Cobol developers, a dying breed, highly sought after to maintain ancient IT infrastructure, and commanding huge saleries to keep old systems alive.
Maybe there's hope for me yet!
One of the Microsoft mailing lists I subscribe to included an article about upgrading from VB6 to VB.Net. It talks about how good it is, how easy it for VB6 developers to pick up, and how good the tools for migrating old applications are.
Unfortunately it misses the point.
I have been developing in VB.Net for nearly two years, and there are a lot of good things about it. But no matter how good it is, you can't escape the fact that there are some fairly significant changes to the language. There are tools which will run through old code and try to fix it up for VB.Net, and the do work quite well. But the code still needs to be reviewed by a developer, and oc course it needs to be fully retested.
Now if an application is undergoing a major upgrade, this work might be justified. However, many companies will have large applications which were written years ago, and which do what they're supposed to. I occasionally have to deal with several applications within our company which contain over a million lines of code. Updates tend to be minor, but they do take place from time to time. To convert such a system to VB.Net would be career suicide. You would be trying up sevelopment and testing staff for six months or more on a project to convert an existing system (the developers of which have probably left the company) that works into a new system, which will almost certainly introduce all kinds of bugs and problems, requiring more time to fix, but delivering no benefits. No manager in their right mind would approve such a project.
You could argue that there would be benefits in the long term, but the fact is that IT departments are always overstretched and don't have time to go looking for unnecessary projects.
Microsoft are panicking because primary support for VB6 is due to end next year, and they would love to cut it loose. But they know that there are too many people using it to do that. It will be like NT4, with extension after extension to the support. In the future, VB6 developers will become like Cobol developers, a dying breed, highly sought after to maintain ancient IT infrastructure, and commanding huge saleries to keep old systems alive.
Maybe there's hope for me yet!
