Legacy apps. Continue with VB6?

[RBSTR]

Hi

I have a couple of legacy applications developed in VB6.

These applications continue to have new versions developed for customer's changed requirements and fixes - both small changes and new modules within the application.

I can see these applications continuing to evolve over the next 1-2 years.

I'm considering whether I should start developing new screens and other appropriate processes in VB.NET using the Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit.

I'm concerned I may be just thinking with my heart rather than my head here. The thought of continuing to develop applications for the next 2 years in VB6 rather than embracing new technoligies is a little soul destroying personally.

From what I have seen I will be able to install the VB6 IDE in Windows 7 and, in theory, should be able to contining to build these applications to run in WIndows 7 (and beyond?)

Would appreciate any thoughts people may have.

 

[vb5prgrmr]

We only know, as far as I know, about the support of the VB runtimes up to version 7 (please someone correct me and tell me that the next os will support vb6!!!). After that, we don't know yet but M$ is trying to kill the beast they created and so far unsuccessfully. And only as an observation, the amount of money they are spending on Win7 advertising with "it was my idea" commercials, it seems to me, there might be something wrong with their sales... Like I said, only an observation..., as it may be their sales are great and they are trying to make up for any losses because of vista...???

You could always check out RealBasic, Delphi, or one of the other multi-platform-independent languages if you don't want to go the .net approach or just buck up and get 2k8 or 2k10 version and do as I have started to do, and just play with it on ones "spare" time...

And if you have not figured it out yet, the long and short of it is, it just may be time to start moving on sad to say... (please, please someone prove me wrong )

 

[strongm]

>there might be something wrong with their sales

Windows 7 sales have really been exceedingly good for Microsoft. They hit 90 million licences sold at the beginning of March.

 

[dilettante]

There is little news of substance about a client OS beyond Windows 7. It's just too early yet.


As far as rewriting existing VB6 programs goes, despite a few snake oil salesmen who are glad to sell you conversion tools and services the cost/benefit ratio is usually pretty poor. More so for programs of any real size.

I'm not convinced that the interop path makes much sense in most cases. The best examples might be where you have to make an old VB6 program work with WCF. Contrary to much ado about Web Services, they aren't very interoperable between technologies except in simple cases.


If you believe you'll be moving to .Net the best strategy might be to just start using it. It is different enough that you'll have a lot of new concepts to learn and old ones to re-learn. So I'd say just dive in after some study, maybe replicating smaller existing projects that you understand well.

I'm not sure I'd even look at the existing VB6 code. Take these on as new projects where you happen to understand the requirements really well.

Be wary of the common trap: success with small and simple projects can make you overconfident. Keep in mind that as complexity grows you'll have more and more to learn. At the same time it is hard for anyone to know everything, and .Net has evolved into a gigantic "everything" that undergoes titanic shifts every 2 or 3 years.

Those who have stuck with VB6 just aren't used to this pace of change anymore. It has been both a luxury and a curse.