Could .NET be useful to us?

[Bobby]

We are developing our Windows applications in Visual C++
6.0 using MFC. We are starting now the process of deciding
whether .NET could be useful to us and whether it make
sense to us to upgrade to Visual Studio .NET. We need to
know why we should use it and what benefits our customers
can get if we upgrade and continue developing of our
products in Visual Studio .NET. Could anyone give us a
hand in better understanding of what are the benefits
Visual Studio .NET compare to Visual C++ 6.0. Or where can
we find this information?

 

[AlexB]

I moved to .NET a long time ago to develop ASP.NET
applications. I couldn't tell you if there are any
benefits to developing Windows applications in .NET
instead of c++ though. I will say that the learning curve
from VB 6 to .NET was pretty steep.

I think I saw the standard sales info, i.e. list of new
features, comparisons, etc., on Microsoft's website on
their product info page.

Good luck.

 

[Tom Leylan]

We are developing our Windows applications in Visual C++
6.0 using MFC. We are starting now the process of deciding
whether .NET could be useful to us and whether it make
sense to us to upgrade to Visual Studio .NET.

I'm no expert but I'd like to help. The answer is "it depends" One of
the first questions is always going to be what does your application do?
Followed by, who are your customers?

I think it is fair to say that with some types of apps there may be few
immediate benefits to converting to .NET. And in a some cases there may in
fact be a downside. That said, the upside includes "that's the direction
things are moving right now." Also there are any number of features that
(if you wanted to add them to your C++ implementation) are already defined
and ready to operate. In C++ (or more to the point outside of the .NET
framework) you will probably have to develop your own solutions.

Designing/developing your own solutions is fun as heck... but they end up
being proprietary. If the day comes when you want to use another language
or a customer needs access to the your libraries or your data the "one-up"
custom solution might fall short. Not that custom methodologies and
solutions can't be updated to handle every situation but rather there is a
lot of overhead in trying to do that "while" trying to update applications
using them. It takes a lot of brains and a lot of fingers... I'm not (for
instance) going to stop development to write my own XML parser.

Perhaps others can post more technical reasons but I hope this helps.

Tom

 

[Guinness Mann]

Could anyone give us a

....what are the benefits
Visual Studio .NET compare to Visual C++ 6.0.

I've recently moved from VC++ 6.0 to C# and it sure seems like the
coding goes much faster. I never realized how much time I spent on
memory and other resource tracking. With GC, all that time can be spent
on other issues.

-- Rick