Migration tools are available to help developers port their
existing applications to Microsoft's new Visual Studio .net
environment. But will the legions of corporate users really want to
try them?
Several developers attending Microsoft's VSLive! Conference in San
Francisco last month say they plan to rewrite their applications
rather than port them to the new environment. Many note that such a
step represents a substantial change for Visual Basic users, who
will have to adapt to the new tool's object-oriented programming
model. Some say they will leave their existing applications running
in the old Visual Studio 6 environment and use Visual Studio .net
for new applications.
"The stuff that's out there already works well," says Sam Cooper, a
senior programmer at Seattle insurance company Safecoan. Cooper
says he sees no reason to move existing applications to the new
environment.
Do you need to change?
Frank Gillett, an analyst at
Forrester Research, says one of the most compelling reasons for a
user to switch to the .net environment is to enable Microsoft
applications to talk to non-Microsoft applications via XML-based
Web services. But if they have no need for that functionality or
any of Visual Studio .net's new features, they should leave their
existing applications alone, he says.
However, Gillett does recommend that corporate users reconsider
their commitment to Microsoft's development environment, because
the new tool represents such a major step for Visual Basic users.
"The effort required to do that is similar to the effort required
to switch to Java," Gillett says. "So if you're going to make the
effort to step up to full distributed computing and object-oriented
programming, stop and reconsider, 'should I switch to Java?' "
Keith Covington, director of IT at GameStop, a Texas-based retail
chain with more than 1,000 stores, says his company will decide
within the next month if it will move its Visual Basic applications
to Microsoft's .net tools or switch to Java.
What does the change mean for developers?
Covington
notes that although GameStop is a Microsoft-centric shop and has
Microsoft skills in-house, it must weigh trying Microsoft's new
tool, which is "not as mature as some other options" and which
brings "a shift in the programming paradigm for our development
staff".
"They're going from a procedural, functional-based programming
model to object-oriented, and that's not an easy leap to make,"
Covington says. "Do you bet the business on applications you're
deploying on the .net framework with a developer base which is new
to this technology? It's beginning again."
Microsoft group product manager John Montgomery says some early
adopters going from Visual Basic to Visual Basic .net have told his
company that it's "not the major change people think it is." He
notes that the new tool is "building on 10 years of experience that
we have bringing customers up to speed."
Lilya Epstein, a systems developer at California-based
wastewater-management company MWH Global, says her personal
preference is to stick with Visual Basic rather than switch to
another programming language. "I feel comfortable with Visual Basic
more than anything. It kind of warms the soul," she says.
But Epstein says she will try to migrate applications before she
considers rewriting them, to try to preserve the time and effort
she spent building objects in Microsoft's Component Object Model.
"When you work for six, seven years, you've got a lot to lose," she
says.
By contrast, Joe Hartman, applications development manager with
HydroChem Industrial Services in Texas, says he doesn't believe in
porting code. "It seems to me you get a bad compromise that never
works as well," he says. Hartman says his company will have to
decide whether to rewrite its Visual Basic payroll, accounts
receivable and accounts payable applications in Visual Basic .net.
"If we do, we'll probably start in the next six months," he says.
Hartman attended the VSLive! conference to look at Microsoft's new
C# language, but he's now questioning if that would be the best
move for his company. "Since we have a Visual Basic background, it
would take a lot to convince us to do otherwise," he says.
Should you port your applications?
Steve Sommer, CIO at
Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, a New York-based law firm with 1,100
employees, has decided otherwise. He says he plans to have his
developers gradually shift the company's financial,
document-management, mail, database and Web applications from
Visual Basic to C#.
"The way it compiles is much quicker because it's native to .net,
and to me, that's where the future lies for programming within
.net," he says. Sommer hopes the switch will help him retain
developers "by giving them something different and more exciting to
do."
Sommer estimates the price tag for the Visual Basic to C# move at
$3m (£2.1m) to $4m (£2.8m), not including hardware. But he says he
thinks it will be faster and less expensive to start from scratch
than to convert the Visual Basic applications to C#, a process he
doesn't believe produces "solid code."
Daniel Appleman, president of California-based Desaware, which
makes add-on components and tools for Visual Studio, says attendees
should not port their code unless there's good economic
justification.
"A lot of people will be doing Visual Basic 6 code for some time,"
Appleman says. "Just training costs will be substantial. We are at
the start of a big and long transition. This transition is
comparable to the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows. .Net's
a big deal, but big deals don't happen overnight."