TC Dale wrote:Are you thinking of upgrading Randy, Gary to the next version (free version offered.. ) or are you guys going to stay with what works?
Dale,
I've been very reluctant to make the move to VB.net. However, if Microsoft had managed the original .Net release the way they are doing the 2005 release I probalby would have made the move a long time ago.
The bottom line is that we are all going to make the switch at some point. (It's hard to make your living using a development system that is no longer supported - and is no longer fully compatible with the dominant version of the OS in play in the world.)
For me, its going to be a slow migration. I've started rewriting some of the various supporting applicaitons on the server side, but will be very slow to make the full conversion for the game clients. (For SpiritWars, the upgrade wizard told me that I have about 8,000 lines of code that need to be modified. That was an incomplete count, however, since the wizard blew up before it finished its evaluation.)
For client-side applications, I'm very excited about what MS is promoting as VB Fusion. You can write .net modules and compile them in a "wrapper" that will allow them to be integrated into VB6 applications. This provides a means of making the migration in steps instead of one total rewrite. (Of course, this also means that the .net framework has to be installed on the client machine which increases the download/install for a lot of folks. When people begin moving to Vista, the framework will be in place and that won't be a factor any longer.)
The development time is slower (it isn't an upgrade - it really is a new language and was written primarily by the C++ folks, not the guys who have been developing VB) but there are tons of performance advantages.