
When to Rewrite Your Software - pclark
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/02/taking-the-road-less-travelled-by.html
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Hexstream
That's pretty anecdotal and light on details... All they say is they rewrote
their software and it was the right thing to do. OK, but I haven't really
learned anything.

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lgriffith
The VB version was a working prototype. They had built a war chest on its back
but the prototype was blocking their future. It was making them vulnerable to
the competition. They smelled blood in the water and it was theirs. The
feeding frenzy was about to begin.

Taking the lessons of the past and a clearer understanding of the needs of the
market place, they created a path to the future. Not a bad choice in my
opinion.

I am not so sure about using C#. That is much too tied to a specific vendor
and programming model. I am sure VB is best used as a prototyping and proof of
concept tool. If you have need of a disposable program, its great. If it must
live long, wide, and numerous, it has trouble being even as good as a poor
choice. With the right choice and a good bit of luck, they not only survived
but went on to thrive.

Looks good to me.

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wwalker3
This article is better than I thought it would be. It's written by Neil
Davidson, co-CEO of Red Gate software. I used their C# profiling tool a few
years back, so my ears perked up a bit when I saw the author's affiliation.

The takeaway seems to be that if you've written your product on a platform (in
their case VB6) that you can't take forward for whatever reason, then it might
make sense to rewrite it.

Davidson freely admits that they rewrote their code for the wrong reasons --
they just couldn't think of anything else to do at the time -- but that it
turned out well in the end for them.

Ironically, they were right about competitors nipping at their heels. I now
use the profiler built into Vistal Studio .NET 2008 instead of the Red Gate
profiler.

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pclark
might interest you to know that Neil is on Hacker News [neild I think]

He's also running a cool [albeit expensive] conference with Joel from Fog
Creek.

