If you have seen any information to the contrary, please come back and give me a link, but as far as I am concerned this is as good a technique as any.

What you may be confusing is that using an Access DB as a backend can be problematic over unreliable network connections or with large numbers of concurrent users. However, those problems have nothing to do with using Access as a front-end with linked tables to another RDBMS.

Caveat emptor

However, I don’t get how hughesnet can have an unlimited download zone between 2AM and 7AM.

Wouldn’t too many people take advantage of that and use up all they capacity on the satellites? Won’t they get rid of it sooner or later. and make all their customers angry again?

If they are able to have a 5 hour FAP free time, why is it that they can’t have it all day.

I think despite of the economy being weak, still the tech industry is doing very well due to the explosive growth of mobile and social networks. So I wonder older programmers could still survive with many hiring opportunities available these days.

As for the career path, it seems to me consulting is not that easy, as I’ve tried and haven’t been successful. The biggest problem is that you can’t just make a living out of it with consistent revenue stream.

So, short of being a manager in a stable company, I think the best, although the hardest, is to work for yourself. It is a hard nut to crack, but I guess once you’ve done it, sky is the limit.

Now that the team has long since made the transition to .NET, we have started doing new development in C# because that is what the team favors now. We still maintain that legacy app in VB.NET because, frankly, there simply isn’t any tangible benefit to outweigh the cost of porting the app. I can’t sell “I need x months of development budget and at the end the app will be the same (perhaps with some bugs introduced by the port), but in a different language”. In the end the most important point was that it simply doesn’t matter. That project has gone forward for years, used third party tools and libraries and never has the VB.NET language created anything more than a trivial issue here and there.

So ultimately, I don’t regret the decision. Not because I think VB.NET was necessarily the right decision, but more because in retrospect the decision didn’t matter as much as I thought going into it. The team is now proficient in both languages, supports products in each of them and our legacy application continues to be a successful project. My advice to someone making the decision today would be: Defer to your team, a happy development team is a productive one.

I do think you are forgetting a key driver in your evaluation — industry and developer community engagement. This may have been debatable in 2009 (no, it really wasn’t) but it’s crystal clear now… the community prefers C# — if you don’t agree look around and packages, open source APIs, etc and you’ll find C# is language under the hood. And a majority of 3rd party components that enterprise developers find themselves integrating into their systems provide better support (examples, native SDKs, etc) in C#.

Forgetting that, I don’t see how you reviewed the “Facts, et al” and came to the decision of VB.NET. The only significant issue I could see holding you back was the legacy VB support — you were worried about converting VB6 to .NET. You could have either converted it to VB.NET as (legacy) and then used C# as the Go Forward — or you could have just converted it to C# (from VB6) — if it can be converted to VB.NET then it can be converted to C#. But honestly I’m not sure conversion for the sake of conversion was a good idea either.

Regarding developer productivity. It seems you missed a perfect opportunity to challenge your team to learn something new and improve themselves. Instead you gave them an easier out so they could remain comfortable. I agree, speed to productivity is a concern so I feel your pain on that, but I also think you preferred a short-term concern as opposed to looking at the long-term growth and strength of your team.

IMO – Based on the findings you present here (except for some dead wrong comparison of C#/VB.NET roadmap) you should have chosen C#.

Do you regret your decision? What has happened since 2009?