Professional Suicide – Working with Old Visual Basic Apps
Well... today I heard something I never thought I'd hear again: "You'll probably have to get into the VB Form to look at how it's working." What!?
I was talking to the original author of Hemlock - asking him for a little help with the lovely concoction he'd created. He wasn't really interested in getting his hands dirty, but he had the advice that it worked - once. His single idea was to check for double-counting. Yup, already did that. After that, he was fresh out, and his suggestion was to get into the VB Form code for that feature in the legacy app that everything's compared to.
While it's a good suggestion, it's also professional suicide.
Can you imagine the conversation when looking for my next job?
"So... what's this Hemlock project all about?"
"Well, it was a risk tool that was developed by one desk and then I took it over and it grew to be a firm-wide tool."
"Hmmm... sounds interesting. What languages did you work in?"
"Java, C#, and mrmph-mrmph."
"Sorry, I didn't get that..."
"Visual Basic"
"Thanks for coming in."
I can't believe this place is this dependent on VB at this point in time. It's like they don't care that their most essential application in the entire Firm is written on something that I stopped using for anything critical more than a decade ago. While it was once the platform for anyone on Windows needing more power than Excel and not enough time to make a VC++ app, it's now just one of many languages that fill that sector.
In fact, there are a lot better languages these days - C#, Java, any of the .Net group. And you don't need to stop there - Java on Windows is a very good platform and can access almost everything you need.
This is not about getting the most out of a good, workable solution written several years ago - everyone in the organization says they want to retire the old system - it's too hard to maintain, too many problems in the core of the system. Heck, a while back, they wanted to replace MS MQ with 29West as the messaging system for the app, but it was impossible. The developers tried, but they could not get rid of MSMQ because something broke here, or there. So they left in MSMQ and had 29West feed MSMQ. Completely whacked out.
The idea of spending any time in this codebase is just something I'm not willing to accept. There aren't a lot of professional lines I won't cross, but this is one of them. I have no desire to have that kind of conversation with my next potential employer.