Upgrade to VS .NET

[tteveris]

We currently use VS C++ 6.0 for all our development. We do not do any Internet or database type programming. Can anyone give us good reasons to upgrade to VS .Net.

We have future plans to do some database programming but not over the Internet or a server type environment.

Thanks in advance

[foniks munkee]

The compiler is closer to the ISO standard for C++.

[FunnyButCocky]

Depends on what kind of database you will be accessing. On the project I'm on we are using Informix and we wrote objects using the ODBC API's for use in Visual C++ 6.0. Just today I ran performance checks using our classes vs using the recently released ODBC.NET from Microsoft. I was getting consistently 40% better performance from .NET. Our odbc api classes are VERY optimized so I'm not sure how Microsoft is getting this much in improvement.

Now, if you are using SQL Server, which I do here at home with the same database scheme, I'm seeing around SEVENTY percent improvements over ODBC AND ADO by using the SQL.NET objects.

Note though that these are NOT applications written in 6.0 and then recompiled in .Net. I rewrote the test app in .NET because I wanted to know how to use the .NET objects correctly so you may need to factor in the fact that a large part of your application will need to be modified to appreciate these kind of performance improvements.

We will be porting our application (about 300,000 lines of code) to .NET because of these numbers. The form display and painting all seem to be faster also. We will also be able to eliminate several 3rd party controls that we use to display tif images and provide a telnet session to the server. Not to mention that the object model just seems to make more sense and will make the code easier to maintain (I hope). :)

[dude_1967]

We will also make the switch within our group in 2003. Many developers are reticent to change and want to simply stick with VC6.

The reasons for the change include, among others, the following:

1) Better support of C++.
2) Much better run-time performance for pure C and C++ code on IA32 platforms.
3) VC6 is no longer available for commercial purchase, making it soon to be unsupported.

Good luck.

P.S. If you are interested in run-time performance, then avoid coding in C# ar managed C++. See the post below for a discussion of the run-time performance of code generated by VC7.

http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=225287

Chris.