Upgrade or rebuild...

[KidJavelin]

Hi all.

New kid on the block here.

Background: I have a legacy application written in VB 3.0(at least that's what the documentation claims). It takes a text file, hashes it and then displays it to the screen in a form format.

The text file: fixed width, two to three characters in all lines(on RIGHT column) are used as position reference for specific text extraction. The file contains multiple "records", with seperate start and stop markers. The entire file has a start and stop marker.

Problem: Upgrade to a newer version of VB, or scrap the whole thing a rewrite it in something else like C/C++ or Java?

Thanks to all!
John

[Hack]

Welcome to the forums.

There are no such things a .mak files anymore, so to upgrade it you would have to open a new, standard exe, project in VB6, and then do an Add Form/Add Module to get all the old forms and modules into your new project.

The code it is written in should work, however, there have been a lot of changes between VB3 and VB6 so you may find you will want to do some rewriting to take advantage of some of the changes. That, of course, is your call.

Regardless of what changes you may need to make or may want to make, it will still be, at least from a theoretical standpoint, quicker to upgrade.

How large is the project;i.e., how many forms/modules?

[KidJavelin]

8 forms, and I believe 10-12 modules.

I forgot to mention that this project doesn't really have a timeframe associated with it. This is just one of those "Wouldn't it be cool if..." things that we have around here. A complete rewrite isn't totally out of the question(the head honcho is edging that direction)

[Hack]

I had to chuckle when I read your response. Why in the world would someone develop a project that had more modules than it did forms?

Oh well...anyway it doesn't sound like it would be a real big deal to do the rewrite, and who knows, you may even wind up with more forms than modules in the new version.

[KidJavelin]

Woops. It only has 4. I was looking at the wrong one before.

At any rate. It's looking like a total rewrite at this point. What are the pros/cons of writing in C++?

John