Seeking migration advice

[Joseph Geretz]

I don't know if this is the right group for my question, but I'm seeking
advice from knowledgable .NET developers. Hopefully I've come to the right
place.

I work with a document management application which is tightly integrated
with the workstation Windows environment. Our software does not necessarily
handle any specific document type. User's can import any document type into
our repository. On the display side, we use WinAPI to discover the
associated application for a particular file type, and then to launch that
document with its associated application. To make matters even more
seamless, the native application is embedded into our own application
desktop space, again, using the WinAPI. I can safely say that this
particular VB application is more dependent on WinAPI than any other VB
application I have worked with.

We are contemplating a move to .NET, and a conversion of our Client / Server
architecture to n-Tier. The server side tier will definitely be implemented
using .NET Web Services. Given our dependency on Win32 at the client though,
I'm wrestling with whether the Framework environment at the client will
allow me the close integration we need with the Windows environment and with
the applications registered in that environment, to do the sort of API
operations I've described above. Although I've done several front-to-back
n-tier implementations in .NET, none of them have had this sort of
dependency on Win32 at the client, so I don't really have any frame of
reference to make this determination. Has anyone out there done .NET
implementations with heavy dependency on Win32 API?

Thanks for any advice which you can offer.

- Joe Geretz -

 

[Rob Teixeira [MVP]]

Don't think this should be a problem Joseph.
If anything, my experience with .NET points to it as being rather more
flexible when it comes to consuming win32 API functions than VB6 was. You
have nearly complete control of marshalling .NET types back and forth to C
types, and you get automatic support for things like Unicode functions -
something that required extra code and planning in VB6. Just be careful and
get a good reference. Although the Declare statement is still supported,
there are subtle differences and other things you need to take into
account - meaning you can't just copy-paste the code from VB6 in most
scenarios.

-Rob Teixeira [MVP]

 

[Michael Culley]

I don't know if this is the right group for my question, but I'm seeking
advice from knowledgable .NET developers. Hopefully I've come to the right
place.

You won't have any problems with APIs in .net, it is much more flexible than VB6. I've done an API that uses a fair bit of apis for
TWAIN and Video for Windows and had no problems (besides the usual api problems . The only problem you might have is that it is
sometimes more complicated due to it's greater flexibility.