Advice on migration from MFC

  • Thread starter Thread starter sWitCh
  • Start date Start date
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sWitCh

Hello. I develop a chat application. Currently I'm using MFC 7.1. I am
thinking about migrating to C# and .NET platform. I've found some good
reasons to migrate: a lot less development time, ease of development,
modernity of the platform, maintenance ease, no memory leaks - bad
pointers... some of these are strong ones.
My app is still pretty young and small, most of its current features,
like sounds, networking, image buttons or tray icon could be easily
imitated in .NET. But in the future I would like to include some extra
options and I won't migrate to .NET if there are no libraries available
for doing them. Some of these options are: skinning (which I have now
partially implemented), chat message encryption, and voice
communication. In a far future, I might include webcam support.
Could these things be included in my app in any way if I migrate to .NET?

Thanks a lot.
Javier
 
Hello. I develop a chat application. Currently I'm using MFC 7.1. I am
thinking about migrating to C# and .NET platform. I've found some good
reasons to migrate: a lot less development time, ease of development,
modernity of the platform, maintenance ease, no memory leaks - bad
pointers... some of these are strong ones.
My app is still pretty young and small, most of its current features,
like sounds, networking, image buttons or tray icon could be easily
imitated in .NET. But in the future I would like to include some extra
options and I won't migrate to .NET if there are no libraries available
for doing them. Some of these options are: skinning (which I have now
partially implemented), chat message encryption, and voice
communication. In a far future, I might include webcam support.
Could these things be included in my app in any way if I migrate to .NET?

Thanks a lot.
Javier
Click to expand...

Javier

I am a hobby programmer and made the switch to NET and C# about a year
ago.

The IDE is very good and C# is a very elegant language and I found the
transition (from VB in my case) quite straightforward.

There are things 'missing' though - for instance there is no facility
to play sounds in C# so you have to makes use of the Windows API -
after VB that was quite natural to me although deciding what type of
variables to pass can sometimes be quite fun.

I think that there's probably very little that you won't be able to do
compared to C++ but many things you will need to do differently,
certainly I have found I had to build up a library of API calls fairly
quickly to 'fill the gaps'. To me the emphasis of NET is very much on
web development rather than desktop apps but that seems to be the way
the world is going although it does leave desktop developers out in
the cold a bit.

The communal knowledge is building up and there are some very helpful
contributors in the dotnet groups, my experience so far though is that
it is much easier to get help on Delphi or VB6 still, as the knowledge
base there has been around much longer. Even many of the books
available are still either very basic, little better than the help
file, or so technical that I get a headache reading them!
 
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