[Sussex] RE: [Sussex] Moving VB to LINUX - DeLux

[Geoff Teale]

Domonic wrote:
--------------
> It does sound very interesting.  But are we then going to end 
> up with some
> nasty spaghetti coding on a different platform, still 
> complaining that it
> cant find the Access database... =)

Yes, is the answer ;)

> There is still a big question about educating many VB hugging 
> developers to
> have a more 'long term' view in their coding practise.  Try 
> persuading many
> VB developers to consider the project/projects as a whole 
> before scoping a
> variable globaly etc.  

That's true.  But generally if you were going to adopt this approach as a
long term strategy your developers would have to learn Object Pascal -
courses and books on this subject are more rigourous on the subject of
design because this has been a pure OO language since version 1.0  (and
indeed prior to that, hidden away in Turbo Pascal).  

> <DEVILS ADVOCATE>
> Perhaps this legacy code is better off left where it is and 
> persuade the
> management to look forward wholeheartedly.  After all, any 
> decent developer
> could support this legacy code until it falls over and dies...
> Is this conversion just a wacky geeky idea that strikes us as fun...
> </DEVILS ADVOCATE>

It's a hard thing to stop and say, OK lets redo everything from scratch -
the investment in a bespoke system is often huge and to justify it you have
to write it off over a number of years.  If you have a VB 6 system you
developed last year you 're going to want to keep it a while longer!

Ulitmately Microsoft have abandened VB 6.  There is no VB compiler for XP -
the current one works in most cases, but with every update to a DLL it gets
less and less reliable and is not supported on XP, nor will it be supported
on the next windows server platforms.  Eventually companies will have to
move on from NT4 and 2000 - as they become unsupported the weight of viruses
and secuirty cracks will make them a liability - right now Microsoft offer
no option other than this:

* Scrap the majority of your bespoke code
* Move wholesale to a new OS (XP) and dev platform (.NET)

Given that choice the idea of moving to LINUX and maintaining your codebase
(retraining still required but no instant redevelopment hit) suddenly seems
a lot easier.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org
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