You've just rewritten your application using the next version of the development tool and your web app is up to date with all sorts of spiffy new features. Your team is tired after the prolonged effort to get things running, but it's done and you can relax.
Unfortunately, with today's technology, you've also signed up for a continual cycle of redevelopment and maintenance. I can hear the mainframe guys saying "Oh, we never have to do that." Yeah, right. The longest weekend of my life (well, maybe the second longest) was spent compiling over 1900 COBOL programs, four times, once for each of our different environments (DEVL, SYST, UAT, PROD), all because the version of COBOL changed and made certain programming approaches invalid with the new version of COBOL.
Technology changes, of this there is no doubt. Businesses that produce that technology will only supply support for a specific period of time. They need to continually make money to fend off shareholders and supporting old technology is a money sink, not a money generator. Within Microsoft there is something called Mainstream Support and this is the period when hot fixes are free. Hot Fixes are available in Extended Support, but only if a support agreement is paid for in advance. For some Microsoft technologies that we currently use these are some dates for the end of Mainstream support:
- .NET Framework 1.1 - October 14, 2008
- Visual Basic 6 - March 31, 2005
- Visual Studio 2003 - October 14, 2008
- SQL Server 2000 - April 8, 2008
- BizTalk 2002 - July 10, 2007
- BizTalk 2004 - July 14, 2009
- Windows 2000 - June 30, 2005
Take a look at the list and you'll see that for many of your applications, Mainstream Supports end within the next 18 months. While this may not be an issue for some of you, you should consider upgrading the development tool as failure to do so may result in incompatibilities between your application and newer technologies.
No comments:
Post a Comment