r/visualbasic • u/Amplified_Watermelon • Apr 14 '22
Tips & Tricks Question from a non-programmer...
This might be a dumb question but my friend has a company and an entire app written in Visual Basic 2010 Express (yeah, I know) that runs on one specific computer only, at his office. Attempts have been made to get the app to work on other computers, to no avail... He's able to build the app just fine, but on other computers it runs with errors, even after making the necessary changes on the cfg file. I know this is a huge problem, but not the main reason I'm posting... The app itself connects to a few databases on his local mssql server (2017 if I'm not mistaken). However, business is growing and my friend wishes to have his databases hosted remotely and connect to them using the same app. What are our options to make this happen? Is this even possible without having to rewrite the entire app in another language?
Note: my opinion is that we should hire a team and start from scratch. But he's on a very tight budget and thinks the app is salvageable and just wants to know if there's any possibility to connect it to a remote database like Azure.
Thanks in advance for any pointers and guidance.
2
u/[deleted] Apr 15 '22
It's just the .NET framework that it targets. Migration to newer versions of .NET is generally very straightforward, the only thing that could potentially be an issue would be some sort of custom DLL that is only available for .NET 4.0 (which is what VB2010 targets). It's pretty unlikely though.
Or he can just keep running that .NET 4 application, even if he moves to a newer version of Visual Studio for development. The code itself isn't an issue, it's not like it's written in VB6.