I was trying like mad to remember the name of this Australian writer as I was ending my post. I wish he'd written more. One of my all time favorites. As good a way with words as Tolkien.
It began with the Lucky Starr series, juveniles written by Isaac Assimov. At 12 I read Heinlien's "Stranger In a Strange Land" (hot off the book club press) and Huxley's "Brave New World". During High School ('62-'66) I picked up Analog and got a subscription. How do you try to package all that in a class? For instance, what do you consider the main themes of Science Fiction? Is the Lensmen series by EE Doc Smith a Space Opera? How about Dune? Is Dune about the technology or the characters. Is it about Christianity vs. the Muslim religions? In my junior year of high school I essentially took January and February off to read the LOTR trilogy. Didn't get much homework done. I think I was 14 when I read Assimov's Foundation. Good luck shaping this course and I hope you reply to the thread with your reading list. hmmm. Philip K Dick, Andre Norton, Al Bester, Zelazny, Poul Anderson, etc. etc.
Ethan, many small companies have, and will continue to, develop in VB becauase ALL of the alternatives are more expensive. VB is indeed the greatest language for client/server applications. It's fast and it's cheap. Does it have glitches. Yes. Can they be overcome. Yes. Just like any other language.
So this is not about the language.
Now are there substantial differences between VB6 and.NET, yes, huge ones.
So the next question is, which version of VB are you talking about? You didn't state which one was used for the original development.
If the boss isn't using.NET, then it's time he did, and got the application converted to objects. Then you can continue this conversation.
It sounds like upper management is leaning on your IT director to produce something and he's waving his arms around like a maniac.
It's not a pretty situation. Some needs to calm him down and talk some sense into him.
As has been state elsewhere, suddenly switching to Java will buy the company nothing but lost time, heartache (or more heartache if he and or the comany are already under pressure), and money going to off shore services, potentilaly for a long time. It will acomplish absolutely nothing positive in less than about 2 years.
The guy needs to sit down and work out a serious budget before he drags the company under. Alternatively, you go over his head and explain to his boss that the guy has just gone over board and is going to drive the company into the mud. Explain the bad news and pray that you get his job (or not) after they fire him.
The only problem I ever had with the mainframe was that, when it craps out, you've just put thousands of people into thumb twiddle mode. Presumably mainframes can be set up with failover today. Back in the day, we didn't have fail over.
I remember the day when Nynex was told the people had left the building, except for the computer. A guy went to the site on Third Avenue in Manhattan with cable cutters and whomped the line. It was connected to a Fortune 50 corporate mainframe, putting people to sleep all across not only the US, but parts of Europe, South American and Asia.
I almost felt sorry for the guy trying to find the one pair of wires in the 500 pair bundle that would bring the computer back online.
Ahh...the many years I've spent trying to make managment understand....
And why Open Source makes so much sense, at least from a got broke/get fixed perspective. Still haven't figured out the financial incentives.:)
I always send my error records to microsoft, then either they fix it or they pass it on to the purveyor of the software. I've had a number of issues identified and remediated because of this feedback loop. There's no reason not to send the crash report to MS. It contains no data about your machine or it's contents. If MS passes the bug along, they don't identify the source. So where's the problem?
Once upon a time there was Adventure http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Adventure.htm/ which was really an analogy of the development of systems and the code required for that activity.
So coding has been a game since at least 1975....about time you guys caught up.
We're going to move from VB6 to VB.NET because we write applications for a diverse set of organizations where the applications have a lot of commonalities. We're looking for objects to support code reuse amongst the applications, all of which are in VB. That way we get an instant maintenance reduction by eliminating all of the redundancy in the various applications.
Been there. Done that. I went to the CEO of the company the day I left and had a heart to heart for an hour. I was able to do this 'cause I'd known him since I was in my early teens. His wife happened to be one of my mother's best friends. Six months later he fired the head of IT. So it's really a matter of who you know.
I can't begin to tell you how many times I've fought this battle in both the public and private sector. Your best resource is your audit track record. You have to find a diplomatic way of putting a squeeze on them.
If you've got an internal billing situation for IT support, you need to find out how to cut the bill from them. This will pressure them to provide services. If the amount is to small to jump there radar you're pretty much SOL.
Alternatively, ignore them. Get your own budget from your own operation and freeze them out, pretty much the same as outsourcing to India. This will also get the attention of your mamouth companies budget office. If you can prove savings, it'll give you some more leverage against the IT rascals.
Go dumpster diving around their office after hours and see if you can find some malfeasance. Report it to the company auditors. Take over the IT dept. Man the barracades and raise the flags. It's a shooting war!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying like mad to remember the name of this Australian writer as I was ending my post. I wish he'd written more. One of my all time favorites. As good a way with words as Tolkien.
It began with the Lucky Starr series, juveniles written by Isaac Assimov. At 12 I read Heinlien's "Stranger In a Strange Land" (hot off the book club press) and Huxley's "Brave New World". During High School ('62-'66) I picked up Analog and got a subscription. How do you try to package all that in a class? For instance, what do you consider the main themes of Science Fiction? Is the Lensmen series by EE Doc Smith a Space Opera? How about Dune? Is Dune about the technology or the characters. Is it about Christianity vs. the Muslim religions? In my junior year of high school I essentially took January and February off to read the LOTR trilogy. Didn't get much homework done. I think I was 14 when I read Assimov's Foundation. Good luck shaping this course and I hope you reply to the thread with your reading list. hmmm. Philip K Dick, Andre Norton, Al Bester, Zelazny, Poul Anderson, etc. etc.
Who's Cliff Wells? And why does anyone care?
Ethan, many small companies have, and will continue to, develop in VB becauase ALL of the alternatives are more expensive. VB is indeed the greatest language for client/server applications. It's fast and it's cheap. Does it have glitches. Yes. Can they be overcome. Yes. Just like any other language. So this is not about the language. Now are there substantial differences between VB6 and .NET, yes, huge ones.
So the next question is, which version of VB are you talking about? You didn't state which one was used for the original development.
If the boss isn't using .NET, then it's time he did, and got the application converted to objects. Then you can continue this conversation.
It sounds like upper management is leaning on your IT director to produce something and he's waving his arms around like a maniac.
It's not a pretty situation. Some needs to calm him down and talk some sense into him.
As has been state elsewhere, suddenly switching to Java will buy the company nothing but lost time, heartache (or more heartache if he and or the comany are already under pressure), and money going to off shore services, potentilaly for a long time. It will acomplish absolutely nothing positive in less than about 2 years.
The guy needs to sit down and work out a serious budget before he drags the company under. Alternatively, you go over his head and explain to his boss that the guy has just gone over board and is going to drive the company into the mud. Explain the bad news and pray that you get his job (or not) after they fire him.
The only problem I ever had with the mainframe was that, when it craps out, you've just put thousands of people into thumb twiddle mode. Presumably mainframes can be set up with failover today. Back in the day, we didn't have fail over. I remember the day when Nynex was told the people had left the building, except for the computer. A guy went to the site on Third Avenue in Manhattan with cable cutters and whomped the line. It was connected to a Fortune 50 corporate mainframe, putting people to sleep all across not only the US, but parts of Europe, South American and Asia. I almost felt sorry for the guy trying to find the one pair of wires in the 500 pair bundle that would bring the computer back online.
I was doing some of this dhtml and java scripting 6 years ago. Where have these people been? (Oh! It's IBM. never mind)
In the US they'll just make good targets for teenagers with air rifles.
Ahh...the many years I've spent trying to make managment understand.... And why Open Source makes so much sense, at least from a got broke/get fixed perspective. Still haven't figured out the financial incentives. :)
I always send my error records to microsoft, then either they fix it or they pass it on to the purveyor of the software. I've had a number of issues identified and remediated because of this feedback loop. There's no reason not to send the crash report to MS. It contains no data about your machine or it's contents. If MS passes the bug along, they don't identify the source. So where's the problem?
Once upon a time there was Adventure http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Adventure.htm/ which was really an analogy of the development of systems and the code required for that activity. So coding has been a game since at least 1975....about time you guys caught up.
We're going to move from VB6 to VB.NET because we write applications for a diverse set of organizations where the applications have a lot of commonalities. We're looking for objects to support code reuse amongst the applications, all of which are in VB. That way we get an instant maintenance reduction by eliminating all of the redundancy in the various applications.
Been there. Done that. I went to the CEO of the company the day I left and had a heart to heart for an hour. I was able to do this 'cause I'd known him since I was in my early teens. His wife happened to be one of my mother's best friends. Six months later he fired the head of IT. So it's really a matter of who you know.
I can't begin to tell you how many times I've fought this battle in both the public and private sector. Your best resource is your audit track record. You have to find a diplomatic way of putting a squeeze on them.
If you've got an internal billing situation for IT support, you need to find out how to cut the bill from them. This will pressure them to provide services. If the amount is to small to jump there radar you're pretty much SOL.
Alternatively, ignore them. Get your own budget from your own operation and freeze them out, pretty much the same as outsourcing to India. This will also get the attention of your mamouth companies budget office. If you can prove savings, it'll give you some more leverage against the IT rascals.
Go dumpster diving around their office after hours and see if you can find some malfeasance. Report it to the company auditors. Take over the IT dept. Man the barracades and raise the flags. It's a shooting war!!!