I have a customer using the Access 97 runtime to support part of their product. Ideally, given the budget to do so, I would have replaced that dinosaur by this point, but that isn't an option today. I am not the system's original author, but am attempting to provide ongoing support. To distribute this to their customers, they bought the...
Morning all, I've gone and told a customer I could migrate some of their old data out of a DOS based system into the new system I've developed for them. However I said that without actually looking at the files that stored the data in the old system - I just figured a quick google would solve all the problem for me... I was wrong! Anyw...
I work on a large code base with a large install base of users. The code was originally written in vb6 with a few c++ COM modules for low level work. It is completely infeasible to rewrite all of the code that is already written in vb6 and is being used by our customers every day, but we are also continuing to make improvements and cus...
My company has tons of legacy applications that are written in VB6. We are in transitions from moving VB6 applications to .NET (3.5 specifically). What would be the best strategy for moving form VB6 to .NET? NOTE: Below update should go to "Project Management" and has nothing to do with the main question. [UPDATE]: Thank you for...
Hi, I have a customer that has an old non-existant application; he had a problem with the company that made the application and they won't disclose his database password. He realized that he signed a contract (back then) where it said that he was sort of "renting" the application and they had no right to disclose anything. This customer...
For some perverse reason, I want to try Python 1.0.. How would I go about compiling it, or rather, what is the earlier version that will compile cleanly with current compilers? I'm using Mac OS X 10.5, although since it's for nothing more than curiosity (about how the language has changed), compiling in a Linux virtual machine is possib...
Does anyone have any experience of introducing FxCop to legacy code? We would like to have our build fail if anyone introduces code that violates rules. But for the time being, this is impossible, as the legacy code has over 9000 violations. The only way to suppress errors I know of is through the SuppressMessage attribute, but that onl...
We work with legacy database which are saving integer values to the varchar column. We need to map this column to Int32 property and it works well if data in database column are numeric or NULL. But we have problems if column contains empty string instead of null - nhibernate throws error that it cannot convert it to integer. Is it p...
We have a large, multi-platform application written in C. (with a small but growing amount of C++) It has evolved over the years with many features you would expect in a large C/C++ application: #ifdef hell Large files that make it hard to isolate testable code Functions that are too complex to be easily testable Since this code is t...
I've inherited a rather old big and complex codebase for a program originally targeted at MSDOS. It turns out that some sections of this program are written in an obscure dialect of x86 assembler called "Phar Lap assembler", after the company and product that produced the assembler program. I've done a fairly deep google search and I'm u...
We are using a legacy compiler, based on gcc 2.6.0, to cross compile for an old imbedded processor we are still using (yes, it is still in use since 1994!). The engineer that did the gcc port for this chip has long since moved on. Although we might be able to recover the gcc 2.6.0 source from somewhere on the web, the change set for this...
We have a legacy linker that uses libc5, and due to several factors we only have the binary and not the source. Yes, version control would have saved us from our current problem... that is now in use for our full tool chain and product line, but this particular horse is long gone. This linker works on linux kernel 2.6.24, but on 2.6.25 ...
I am adding MVC to a project that has MANY legacy webform pages. This works fine. However, I currently have a separate masterpage for MVC and for the webforms. The two master pages produce essentially identical output. I'd really like to kill the webforms one and just use the MVC master page with all my pages and stay DRY. Not bei...
In Rob Conery's post about SubSonic Migrations written in October 2007 he mentions in the 'Left To Do' list that: I want to be able to “Reverse Engineer” an existing DB into a migration file I am looking at introducing versioning control for an existing database with a lot tables, and SubSonic looks like the tool for me, but I'...
At the moment, we have to build an application which is based on a legacy one. Code for that old application should be thrown away and rewritten, but as it usually goes - instead of rewriting it, we need to base something new on it. Recently, we decided to go the DomainDrivenDesign path. So -- anti corruption layer could be a solution ...
Hello, Hopefully you ASP.NET pros out there can answer this question. I have a single web application that contains a website and a web service - both have several assembly references in common (data access layer, utilities, etc) - however, recent changes made to the web service will require different versions of the common assemblies,...
I have a legacy DNN site, and an error shows up at the top of the page telling me that one of the modules failed to load. That's wonderful, but that doesn't tell me a damned thing about why the module didn't load. Does anyone unfortunate enough to work with DotNetNuke know how to view a stack trace when a module explodes? I keep looki...
I need to wrap an interactive DOS application with GUI. The DOS application does not accept any command line parameters. As such, all works have to be done interactively. The process to get a job done is as follow: 1. Start the DOS application in DOS command prompt. 2. A screen appears and we are asked to "Press any key to start" 3. Pr...
I need to drive a legacy DOS application through SendKey in C#. However, I found that it didn't work. From http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=39626, I understand that SendKey doesn't really works on MS-DOS application. All MS-DOS application receives is "\" when SendKey is called. However, the forum points to MSDN Article 142819...
We all know that throwing pointers to exception is bad: try { ... throw new MyExceptionClass(); } catch (MyExceptionClass* e) { ... } What's your approach to cleaning the catch targets up in legacy code? I figure that I can fix the first part by making operator new private: class MyExceptionClass { public: ... private...