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Overcoming the Business Hurdles of Adopting .NET
Get a clear picture of the costs and timeline involved in .NET migration to create the right plan for your team.
by Brian Noyes

For this solution: Visual Studio .NET

If your company develops Web applications or products that run on Windows, then it's virtually certain you'll want to migrate to .NET at some point. The simple fact you're reading this magazine shows you're at least considering moving to .NET. But before you can start your migration planning you need to answer two big questions: When should you migrate, and what is it going to cost you in terms of money and effort? The answers to these questions will vary widely—based on your current development projects, company size, staff expertise, and many other factors—so I can't give simple answers to fit every situation. However, I can discuss factors to consider as you decide the right time to migrate and determine what it'll cost.

Adopting .NET will mean different things to different companies. The minimal route would be to simply upgrade your development environment to Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), but to continue to develop non-.NET Framework applications. A maximal route would be to start a new project using VS.NET, .NET languages, .NET Framework classes, and .NET Enterprise Servers for the infrastructure. The right direction for your organization should be driven by costs, training, project types, and timing considerations. Also realize that this is really version 1 of a whole new development platform, so there is some risk associated with early adoption.

Consider the Cost
There are a number of expense factors to evaluate when migrating to .NET. You need to calculate both the acquisition and implementation costs of migrating to .NET in general and VS.NET specifically; also estimate how much you can save in intangible productivity gains and maintenance savings. Now, compare those savings to your acquisition and implementation costs (see Figure 1). For a large company, the implementation costs are probably going to far outweigh the acquisition costs of purchasing VS.NET. However, for a small company the purchase cost might be a larger consideration, or even a barrier, to rapid migration.

Figure 1 Ride the .NET Wave

Although your company can adopt .NET technologies with the Software Development Kit (SDK), without actually using VS.NET, in the near term that decision doesn't make a lot of sense. It's going to take a while for the third-party development tool market to spool up and really start offering development tools to compete with VS.NET. Until that time, it's not cost effective for your developers to use the command line tools in the SDK just to save the cost of purchasing VS.NET.

When evaluating costs, also account for the potential cost impact on other development tool purchases you've made or plan to make. For example, if you're thinking of purchasing licenses for design and modeling tools, note that VS.NET Enterprise Architect, included in the Enterprise Edition of VS.NET, will ship with a specialized version of Visio that includes full UML modeling and round-trip engineering features that are on par with similar tools. Enterprise Architect also includes enterprise management, profiling, report generation, and other tools that could affect your other tool purchases. So, if you're about to invest in a report generation tool, perhaps wait and evaluate whether the Crystal Reports capabilities included in Enterprise Architect can satisfy your requirements.