Desktop Application Longevity

Question

Say if you had to develop a huge windows desktop app what language/technology you believe will be supported longer by MS (or by its manufacturer if not MS product)?

What language/framework would give the app greater longevity without the need to be adapted or rewritten in order to run on newer versions of windows as they are released?

C++ Win32 API?(will MS ever rewrite those?)

C# .NET?WPF?

Delphi, wxWidgets, Qt or some other crazy thing?

Please for the sake of the argument lets not dwell on other aspects of the question. What will give the app greater life is the question here.

Answer 1

Much of .NET runs on top of Win32. It's been around a long time, and will likely be supported well into the future.

Answer 2

I will go for Java + SWT which give u absolute Native feel. I think SWT is somehow a reincarnation of wxWidget in Java world. You can run it on different platform though.

Answer 3

Win32 is a safe bet to target if you are interested in running on Windows with an eye for when it becomes legacy. What this implies is that there are several libraries built on Win32 that will suit your purpose.

Keeping in mind that while Windows has had a strong consumer base for the longest time, we are seeing changes as they try to move away from Win32. They have a much reduced capacity to produce low level code (Vista, Windows 7) and improvements to their operating systems, instead relying on the same core of kernel code and userspace implementation. To me this is the sign of a company that may not always be the wisest investment.

So, it might be good news to know that projects like WINE will likely continue to implement a "free" version of Win32 long after it has been abandoned by Microsoft. Kinda like how people get Commodore 64 or NES emulators ;) Either by the company taking a whole new direction or being eroded away by competition (Linux).

So, if it has to be Windows now, any library that is reported to run well on top of WINE. If you can give the idea of a platform not based in Windows, you will reap the benefits of free and open source software! Software that most often can run on Windows and countless other platforms.

I see a suggestion for Java, that's a safe bet too, but Java can sometimes be frustrating for certain people.

I find Java apps have the longest lifetime and when coded right work on all platforms in a way that just gives me a buzz!

But again, not trying to take you in any directions. That's just the landscape of things :)

Answer 4

I am sure .net will be supported for a long time.

Answer 5

If you're creating a large application, it will require maintenance one way or another anyway. From time to time, that will require changes to support a new OS. Get over it :)

I don't think Microsoft are going to make anything go away, but they might make incompatible changes occasionally.

We run our applications in "a cloud" providing SaaS to people, and even we have to change stuff for new OSs, as the old ones stop being supported by the hardware vendors any more.

Answer 6

There's really no safe bet. Just pick one of the major ones and hope for the best.

My employer makes a 2 million line windows app, originally started in 1995. At the time they knew it was going to become a large long-living code base, so they faced the same choice. At the time, java was nothing, .NET didn't exist, qt and wxwidgets were meaningless specks on the horizon. The choices were C++/MFC, Delphi and VB. They chose Delphi, because VB didn't seem powerful enough, and C++ seemed too complicated to retrain the existing developers for.

Delphi was and is the smallest platform in marketshare of those three, but surprisingly it has proven the best choice. There hasn't been the major porting effort that happened in the VB world with the .NET transition. At the same time, Delphi has kept up with new windows api's as they were introduced. Crucially, because it's more high-level than C++, the codebase has proven quite manageable for a small team.

All this is to say that you never know whether you're making the right choice. If you pick one of the major platforms, it's likely that you'll have sane upgrade paths. Likely, but not a given.