I wrote a windows service using VB that read some legacy data from Visual Foxpro Databases to be inserted in SQL 2005. The problem is this use to run fine in Windows server 2003 32-Bits, but the client recently moved to Windows 2003 64-Bits and now the service won't work. I'm getting a message the the VFP .NET OLEdb provider is not found...
Lately I had to change some code on older systems where not all of the code has unit tests. Before making the changes I want to write tests, but each class created a lot of dependencies and other anti-patterns which made testing quite hard. Obviously, I wanted to refactor the code to make it easier to test, write the tests and then chang...
I wondered if anyone uses virtualized desktop PCs (running WinXP Pro or older) to have some old applications that are seldom used available for some ongoing tasks. Say you have a really old project that every once in a while needs a document update in a database system or something like that. The database application is running on a vir...
I am the build manager on a large legacy Java project. It currently uses a combination of ant and nested shell scripts to do building, testing, and packaging. It is fragile and complex and old. We'd like to replace it with a fresh set of scripts and are considering alternatives to ant. Maven 2 sounds interesting. We like the dependency...
I have a student position working on some websites for my school. Everything my school does is in VBScript/ASP Classic. I'm a bit confused about something. I can understand that my school as a LOT of code written in VBScript, and that migrating it would be a phenomenal task. But is it just me, or is it kinda stupid that they make us ...
I'm wondering what strategies people use for reduced sign on with legacy applications and how effective they have found them? We have an ASP.Net based intranet and own a lot of the legacy applications, but not all. We also have BizTalk and are considering the use of it's SSO engine too. ...
I am currently in the process of restructuring my local Subversion repository by adding some new projects and merging legacy code and data from a couple of older repositories into it. When I have done this in the past I have usually put the legacy code in a dedicated "legacy" folder, as not to "disturb" the new and "well-structured" co...
I have an existing GUI application that should have been implemented as a service. Basically, I need to be able to remotely log onto and off of the Windows 2003 server and still keep this program running. Is this even possible? EDIT: Further refinement here... I do not have the source, it's not my application. ...
I’ve been thinking about the number of projects we have inhouse that are still being developed using visual studio 6 and how best to migrate them forward onto visual studio 2008. The projects range in flavours of C/C++ and VB. Is it better to let VS2k8 convert the workspaces into solutions, fix any compile errors and be on your merry wa...
Background: I believe most of the major financial institutes and major retailers still have many critical business processes and data relied on the legacy systems, such as Mainframe. Many developers still write code on those terminal windows without a debugger to add enhancements to their Mainframe systems, which I call the stone age o...
I've just started writing unit tests for a legacy code module with large physical dependencies using the #include directive. I've been dealing with them a few ways that felt overly tedious (providing empty headers to break long #include dependency lists, and using #define to prevent classes from being compiled) and was looking for some b...
We're having problem with a huge number of legacy stored procedures at work. Do you guys recommend any tool the can help better understand those procedures? Some kind of reverse engineering that indentifies inter-procedure dependencies and/or procedure vs. tables dependencies. Can be a free or commercial tool. Thanks! ...
In the early-mid 90's, I worked a lot with a development tool called "Forest & Trees." (it was a wierd name back then, too!) It was aimed at developers building "Executive Information" / "Business Intelligence" systems. It was really cool software because you could develop an application very quickly on top of an existing database. Is...
My department is currently faced with the responsibility for the task of maintaining a rather large COBOL code base. We are wondering how to add new features to keep up with business needs. COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days, and we also think we would get higher productivity from using a more modern language like Java or C...
What is the best, preferably free/open source tool for auto-generating Java unit-tests? I know, the unit-tests cannot really serve the same purpose as normal TDD Unit-Tests which document and drive the design of the system. However auto-generated unit-tests can be useful if you have a huge legacy codebase and want to know whether the cha...
We have a 12-year-old Ms Access app that we use for our core inventory warehousing and invoicing system. It IS already running on an SQL Server backend, but all the "logic", forms and reports are in Access. After experiencing the massive amounts of maintenance sludge it took to turn inventory transactions from non-temporal to temporal, I...
I know there have been many questions regarding legacy code here; however I want to broach the human side of the issue. How do you deal with being made to work on a very messy codebase with tight deadlines and an absolute opposition to refactoring? Personally I find it incredibly difficult and that difficulty impacts on my productivity v...
We have a large ASP (classic ASP) application and we would like to convert it to .NET in order to work on further releases. It makes no sense continuing to use ASP as it is obsolete, and we don't want to rewrite it from scratch (Joel Spolsky tells you why). Are there any tools for converting from ASP to ASP.NET 2.0 or 3.5? ...
Any useful metrics will be fine ...
As you work in a legacy codebase what will have the greatest impact over time that will improve the quality of the codebase? Remove unused code Remove duplicated code Add unit tests to improve test coverage where coverage is low Create consistent formatting across files Update 3rd party software Reduce warnings generated by static ana...