Guys,
I have no great love of VB6. BELIEVE ME I have no great love of VB6 !!!! Bear in mind, though, it's not MY decision, it's JON'S. I'm just another bozo on this bus - not my product, not my decision. I am NOT devoted to this platform, other than asking the very legitimate question, is the conversion to another platform worth the cost and time to make the change.
It's fun to debate with other software professionals. I respect your experience, but you need to bear in mind that I, too, am not exactly lacking in experience here - I've been cranking code since 1974, with my first machine being a DEC PDP-8e with real core memory! I wrote a runtime environment for a multi-user accounting platform which paid my living expenses through medical school, for an consulting client that was with me 19 1/2 years (until I retired from the software industry). In order to troubleshoot the infamous AC "can't print on HP printers" bug, I was running Amazing Charts under linux, and sniffing postscript errors through postfix. This is one of the reasons that Jon has given me access to Amazing Charts source code. I had to LEARN VB-6 in order to work with Amazing Charts, and have no great love of it. (ok, so we've proven we can pee farther than everybody else.. now lets get back to the technical debate :-) )
Amazing Charts is not a small simple program.. it has a pretty large code base. It is FAR FROM vanilla VB6 code internally in many places. Database access is, however, packaged in only a few areas of the code that would need to be massaged to work with another database - it would not require a total re-write. The conversion to VB.net would NOT be trivial, and the conversion of the existing codebase to an object oriented programming approach would require an almost TOTAL re-write. (We can debate the pros and cons of object-oriented design another time) Unless you've seen the source code for Amazing Charts, you really have no idea the size or scope of what you are suggesting.
Let me ask you these two simple questions (the first is a 3-parter) 1) What are YOUR personal estimates as to what it would cost in terms of a)man-hours, b)dollars and c)time to redesign, recode, and test your proposed conversion? and 2) If all of this work results in a program that looks, and other than database issues works exactly the same as the existing program, how can you justify the expense?
Regards,
V.
