Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.
crutchfield… my girls last name
So much custom software running on Windows servers.
now that was funny
…and done that.
I worked for a company with a very unique way of doing business, and we found that writing the major components was the only practical solution to the problem.
We didn’t go as far as Crutchfield, as was mentioned accounting is pretty darn generic nowadays and anyone writing their own accounting system is wasting resources, IMHO, so we leveraged an off the shelf accounting system (albeit, one that we could modify), and then wrote the business specific code to interface to it.
The key is simply responsivness to market changes can be directly manifested in changes to the system. For example, by the time I left, we had three distinct, and different pricing models in the system. They changed that every year it seems.
But the other thing that it show, indirectly, is that any large company should have IT staff that can mold their internal software at a fine enough granularity to where it does not get in the way of their operations. IT is a service provider to the rest of the company. IT has never been a profit center, rather it’s an overhead resources sink that empowers the other departments.
This is why its so important to have your own IT staff, or a VERY good relationship with a VAR/consultant. You don’t want yuor company being held back because the software “can’t do that”.
VB6 really stinks, they should have used Delphi right from the Start, then they would not have this vb6 to vb.net issue.
Crutchfield — a courageous decision.
(This was the catch phrase in a comedy series on British television).
VB6 really stinks, they should have used Delphi right from the Start, then they would not have this vb6 to vb.net issue.
Actually if they leverage the COM interop it shouldn’t be a major issue.
There is no reason to rewrite working vb6 executable in .net just for the sake of rewriting.
You can extend the existing code via the interop and transition as demands are placed on your infastructure.
The big problem I saw in the article was sp2 and the way they wrote their software. No language would have fixed that problem. They obviously designed the code in a way that became troublesome when sp2 shipped.
Delphi would have been a decent choice also which I agree with. They may have stilled wanted to move to .net with Delphi also.