John Walker Live

Blogging from Hoboken, NJ...or wherever I happen to be connected from ;)

Search

Flickr Photos

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from John Walker. Make your own badge here.

My Good Ole Friend Visual Interdev

I've been coding in .NET now using Visual Studio since VS.NET 1.0 was released several years ago. I now use VS 2005 for all of my day-to-day coding and I think most would agree this is a good release. I primarily code ASP.NET applications and sometimes find myself complaining about certain parts of the VS IDE from time-to-time. As you get to know a tool more and more you use it, finding its faults becomes easier.

So, I recently have been tasked with ugrading a classic ASP application I did a few years back. It's a substantial upgrade, involving adding new features, smoothing out existing features and re-skinning the UI. Lot's of work and I've completed quite a bit of it over the past 3 months.

I can safely say that it hasn't been much fun, even considering the fact that I built it quite correctly to begin with. I'm using Visual Interdev and VB6, the tools I originally used to built the app to do the upgrade coding. The VB6 side of things is stictly the data access and business logic stuff, so that side hasn't been too bad. However, it is amazing how much less productive I am using Visual Interdev compared with VS 2005. Simple things like session state, view state, server-side controls are things I now take for granted, not to mention the .NET framework in general. Let me tell you, going back to Visual Interdev makes you really appreciate how far the tools have come and what you really do get with .NET.

My guess is that I'm at least 50% more productive with today's tools than I am with the older ones. Just amazing.

So, why am I not re-building the app in .NET? Welp, it's a pretty big job to do and we just don't have the time to do it. I hope to do so beginning sometime late next year. That's part of the story too. So often while I've been doing this upgrade, I've caught myself thinking how much simpler and better the app will be when I do rebuild it.

So, next time you find yourself complaing about your IDE, go back and revisit an app you built 4-5 years ago. You'll quickly find you have a new appreciation for what you use today. Believe me.

Tags Visual Studio Visual Interdev ASP.Net Microsoft .Net Software Development

posted by John Walker @ 11/29/2006 3:00:00 AM

Comments

Comments are closed for this post

John Walker Live

Search

Recent Posts

Flickr Photos

My Good Ole Friend Visual Interdev

Comments