Re: Visual Basic.net

I have a couple of questions for the .Net fans.

The vast majority of people who buy my program, consisting of about 70,000 lines of VB, purchase it on the web and download it. My market is international, and a very sizeable fraction of my customers have only a dialup connection. Quite a number are also still using VB98.

So let's suppose I decide to go to .Net for the next major version of my program, and spend a year or so translating my program into VB.Net. Instead of an 8 MB download, they'll now have more like 25 MB. Some have trouble with the 8, so a lot more are going to be unable to download.

My first question is, what benefit do my customers get from my year of effort? It looks to me like it'll be a serious step backward for some of them, and I don't see any advantage at all to the rest. If nothing else, they'll miss out on the features and improvements I could have added in that one year of work which was devoted to the translation.

I've heard that .Net compiles only to pseudocode, and that it's easier to hack. Is that true? If so, would my fancy new .Net version be less secure than my present VB program?

So my next question is, what benefit do I get for the year of work?

Finally, I understand that M$ has put out a couple of versions of .Net which aren't entirely compatible. Would I have to include a new ~20 MB runtime in the upgrade each time I move to a later version?

In the rosy future, everyone in the world will have high speed Internet access and will be running the very latest M$ operating system with the ..Net runtime installed. Every OS service pack will have the runtime for the latest version of .Net, and everyone's computer will automatically update itself. When do you suppose this'll come to pass? What do you think people in my situation should do in the meantime? Do you think ..Net will still be available then, or will M$ have declared it obsolete and moved to the next great programming idea?

I see the day coming when I won't be able to use VB any more. But it'll take a lot of talking to convince me that VB.Net is what I should replace it with. Once burned. . .

Roy Lewallen
.

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