This is just a quick update on our progress at work. We’ve completed the transition from Visual Studio 2003 to 2005. The program had very few errors when we pulled it up in VS 2005, but it had tons of warnings, which are basically things that will compile, but are probably not in line with best practices.
The program had over 10,000 warnings, and at least half of them involved passing objects to functions before the object had been initialized. By our standard practice, all of our functions can handle that without issue, but we decided to go ahead and fix all of the warnings anyway. That way if we make a mistake in the future that causes a more important warning, it will really stand out. So we eventually got to the point where the program was completely free of errors and warnings (and yes, that meant making over 10,000 individual changes to the code!).
The next step was to switch all of the standard Microsoft controls over to the new DevExpress controls we’re going to use from here on out. At this point we have managed to replicate all of our core functionality from the MS controls using the new DevExpress controls. Most of that was pretty straightforward, but we use outlines and grids in fairly complex ways, and it took us a little while to get everything working correctly.
We wrote a program to handle most of the actual switch, but we were still left with lots of old code referencing properties and methods of the MS controls that don’t match up with the properties and methods of the DevExpress controls. So now we are in the process of cleaning all of that up. We probably have a week or two of that left, and then we’ll only have a few major pieces of the puzzle left.
So what are the last few pieces of the puzzle? We still need to switch all of our old Lead Tools based imaging controls over the new Atalasoft controls we recently purchased, and then we need to swap out the ApproveIT digital signature control we use for the native .NET control from Topaz (our signature pad vendor). Once that’s done, I hope to have time to experiment with the new MS HTML control that comes with VS 2005 to see if we can use that instead of the custom control we wrote that currently handles our HTML.
It may sound like a lot, and I can assure you that the work is long and tedious, but I think we are all excited about the direction we are headed. The new controls will allow us to do some really neat things that we couldn’t really do before, and we’re getting very, very close to having the entire project running on 100% .NET code, with no old COM controls whatsoever.