Why Migrate?
Why hang on to an outdated technology…
- If the code can be preserved in a modern environment
- If the cost and timescale of migration can be minimised
- If the conversion is safe and guaranteed to work?
When a software application is business-critical, fit for purpose and therefore worth saving, economic porting is a strategic must.
Porting to .NET is the wisest thing to do, for the reasons below.
Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio is one of the best Integrated Development Environments available. It enables organisations to create client side, Office integrated, Web-enabled, mobile, and distributed applications efficiently and reliably. Visual Studio increases productivity, it's highly integrated and extensible. Developers like it and the number of VS professionals is fast expanding (while Gupta developers are increasingly hard to find and expensive). The enormous power and flexibility of Visual Studio is the best reason to migrate to .NET. Imagine being able to step from your code into a stored procedure running on the server, to design a database schema, to reverse engineer a class hierarchy into a diagram and add members visually, to plug-in all sorts of productivity tools, to write your own macros and extension tools, to run unit tests, to profile a running application. All in the same IDE!
Windows Integration
Microsoft .NET is fully integrated with Windows and supports all Windows standards. Forms are compatible with Visual Styles and can be skinned without any additional effort by using any of hundreds of freely available skins and themes. All Windows API's are readily available, networking, security and authentication, encryption, file system, COM/ActiveX, all compatible and robustly supported. In fact, the Ice Porter runtime library – the PPJ Framework – is already starting to ship with additional free goodies like a skinning engine, ribbon bar control, MS Chart component etc.
Fast and Reliable
.NET applications are compiled to machine language code. There is no interpreter and this compiled code runs much faster and more reliably than interpreted Gupta SAL code.
Makes Business Sense
The cost of migrating to .NET is a small fraction of the cost of being left behind or having to re-engineer and rewrite your software from scratch. An organisation will have spent a lot of time, money and effort to code business rules, logic, and knowledge into complex programming structures. If it does the job, why put an expiration date on a valuable asset? By migrating to .NET using the Ice Porter automated solution and Dataline’s porting methodology, an organisation can preserve and extend the value of its software application for years to come.
Third Party Components
Once on .NET you can take advantage of a huge variety of free, commercial and open source components. In other words you don't have to reinvent the wheel anymore.
Industry Standards
With .NET you also get a huge and professionally supported library of components to support most industry standard protocols and architectures, and if something is not available in the base .NET framework it will almost certainly be available as an open source or commercial component. This also means that once ported to .NET, applications can be opened up and integrated.
Powerful Language Features
With C# 3.0 or VB.NET state-of-the-art Object Oriented features such as constructors, operators overloading, polymorphism, access modifiers, virtual methods, partial classes, dynamic loading, metadata can be utilised. These languages actually provide support when writing business rules instead of getting in the way.
