Hi Ray, Steve
The company that is interested in finding an alternative has provided a
software solution for 25 years now. It has been through a plethora of
microsoft conversions from dos, /BASIC through to WinXP /VB 6.0. As some
companies are small their version has an Access Database (dont ask me why
) and the medium to large sized organisations have SQL Server backends.
I am also doing a job for a partner company of theirs and they originally
wanted a VB6 front end onto a SQL Server backend. Luckily the head of the
partner company is an open minded I.T professional (going back to assembler
/ unix programming) so convincing him was not too difficult. The press has
been really good regarding open source and linux so I think more people are
realising that there are better products that exist that dont bear the
Microsoft name.
Ray is correct in what he says, VB6 has a short lifespan and the migration
to VB.NET is not that simple.
This company is now having untold problems with WinXP as long running
network connections that are idle are automatically disconnected, their
application for small users open a permanent connection to Access and this
disconnecting "feature" for the sake of network performance is causing
corruptions.
The issues with MDAC (ADO) is also causing support nightmares, i.e
downgrading upgrading , but im not to up to date with all the issues
regarding this. Python solves this as modules are text files and through
sys.path one can control the search path
DLL versions etc have been a nightmare since day one ....
My first motivation was to get them away from Desktop dev and move to
intranet based applications. This they realise and can see the benefits of
moving to this new ("Yet old") alternative. So the question then was What
language / technology to use ?
My first issue to highlight was that if we went with Microsoft then the
costs would be greater not only in licensing but also server specs, and
from fellow colleagues doing .NET development they all say its hungry on
system resources. I also emphasized that Microsoft will be "coercing" them
to keep upgrading and that we should remain vendor neutral and get out of an
environment where choice is limited ....
Having programmed in Perl on Linux, I remembered how frustrating it was to
come back to your code or others , 6 months later and not understand it
-)
not that bad) I think perl is great, so I shifted to python which I know
offers way more than VB 6, even VB.NET especially if multiple programmers
are to work on a project. I also emphasized the importance of a language
been controlled and progressing through programmer enhancement proposals and
computer science principles rather than a marketing panel, I mean how many
times do they change concepts and badge it under something new in VB ? I
also love ruby but I still feel that there are too few libraries, datbase
interfaces (we need this for possible integration.)
Visual Basic has also been a nightmare for memory management and its 1MB
stack space, so recursion is out, in a recent project I have had to write
recursive and non recursive quicksorts and binary searches so I can switch
on large array sets.
I also feel that microsoft's focus on marketing concepts without fixing or
enhancing the core language, even in VB6 now arrays dont have pop so one has
to hold the entire array in memory even when your down to the last few
elements. There are ways to remove items but a lot of work. I feel that its
things like this rather than Data Environments, Class Wizards and
containment instead of inheritence is what has made it into the language
that it is.
Not sure if I am making sense, one could write forever
Cheers
Graeme
