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Webgal - 09 Dec 2004 21:39 GMT

We're having a bit of a quandary at my office and this seems to be the
perfect place to get the answer and perhaps some clarification. Currently,
the "official" architecture for my organization is J2EE. It is my
understanding that the .NET framework serves essentially the same purpose and
that it exists as part of the operating system in Windows. In the past there
have been a number of applications developed in either MS Access or Visual
Basic. Many of these may never be converted to Java and it certainly won't
happen anytime soon. As a result, some people are asking for newer versions
of Visual Basic (i.e. .NET) in order to maintain and improve these existing
applications. Is it possible to use Visual Studio and only develop
"straight" VB code that does not use the framework (this has been
specifically prohibited by upper management)? Do all versions of Visual
Studio give you access to the framework or only the enterprise versions? If
all versions give you access is it possible to determine if/when you are
using the framework? I would really appreciate some guidance from those of
you who are very familiar with this product. Thanks in advance.

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Tim Jarvis - 10 Dec 2004 01:46 GMT

> We're having a bit of a quandary at my office and this seems to be
> the perfect place to get the answer and perhaps some clarification.
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> appreciate some guidance from those of you who are very familiar with
> this product. Thanks in advance.

As I understand it Visual Basic 6 is the last version of Visual Basic
that targets Win32, all later versions of Visual Basic target the .NET
platform. It could also be said that Visual Basic ended at Version 6 as
although Visual Basic for .NET carries the Visual Basic name it is in
fact an entirely different language and applications developed in one
cannot be simply recompiled into the other, there would need to be a
porting process. (there are tools available to help with this)

C++ is the only language flavour in the current version of Visual
Studio that is able to target Win32 only.

ultimately if your company wants to continue programming windows based
machines as windows evolves then they will in fact be forced to go the
managed route eventually because the operating system itself will
become managed over time, Long (long, long delays) horn will be the
start of this process. I assume though that there will be a
compatibility layer, but this would be foolish for greenfields projects
IMO.

I would be willing to bet that future versions of the Java Virtual
Machine running on Windows XXXX (version after Longhorn) will in fact
be running managed code and I doubt that anyone in the know would take
my bet.

(Just my opinion)

Regards Tim.

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Webgal - 10 Dec 2004 15:35 GMT

Thanks you Tim. That was helpful but I'm still a little confused. Do *all*
.NET applications have components on the server? My concern is that a .NET
project running on the same server with J2EE applications would slow
performance to a crawl. Is there any way to determine if server-side
components are being used?

> As I understand it Visual Basic 6 is the last version of Visual Basic
> that targets Win32, all later versions of Visual Basic target the .NET
[quoted text clipped - 23 lines]
>
> Regards Tim.

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Tim Jarvis - 10 Dec 2004 22:54 GMT

> Thanks you Tim. That was helpful but I'm still a little confused.
> Do all .NET applications have components on the server? My concern
> is that a .NET project running on the same server with J2EE
> applications would slow performance to a crawl. Is there any way to
> determine if server-side components are being used?

(firstly my assumption is that we are not talking about Web
Applications i.e asp.net)

the short answer to this is no, not all .net applications have
components on the server, and if you are talking about porting your
current VB application, then the resulting .NET windows forms
application can also be a client based application with no server
components.

In answer to your other question, .NET does not really have a J2EE
style applictaion server architecture, you can create the equivalent
distributed application using .NET remoting, but you would need to
write your own application server host so things like fail-over, load
balancing and security you would have to manage,so of course you could
then provide your own mechanism to determine where your objects are
running. It is possible to host your server in IIS, though data
marshalling and transport becomes more limited and IMO you would then
be better off just using web services (simpler)

Regards Tim.

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