WPF Week At About Visual Basic
Day 5
Decision Time: It's mainframes versus PC's again!
The WPF seminar that is inspiring WPF Week is being held in Microsoft's offices. So it's a little unsettling to listen to Paul Sheriff, the great speaker they brought in for the seminar, explain in unflinching terms how Microsoft is going to throw out the old Windows Forms technology. WPF is not an upgrade to Windows Forms. It's a total replacement. You've got to start over and learn a new way of thinking about programming to use WPF. And that means a huge learning curve is in front of you. And ... oh, by the way ... according to Paul, Windows Forms technology is in "maintainance mode" at Microsoft now. It won't be upgraded any more than it is now. Paul casually mentioned that he hasn't done any significant Windows Forms programming personally in years.
For some of you, the revolution of throwing out the old code and starting over might be a new experience. But it's happened to me quite a few times. I started programming with Fortran on a mainframes.
You do have a choice!
When PC's started replacing mainframes, some programmers stayed with the mainframes. At the seminar, Paul asked if anyone was still programming in Cobol on a mainframe and one person raised his hand. (But since he was in this seminar about WPF ... hmmmm.)
Sticking with the mainframe was actually a fairly good career choice back in the day. For one thing, when the Y2K crisis hit, Cobol mainframe programming was the hottest skill to have. Companies were paying huge consulting contracts to have their old code reworked. Some of that old code will be around for years to come. Somebody's got to do it. In some situations, it can be better job security than marrying the boss's daughter. (Or son. Whatever. Lots of things are changing.)
It happened again when Windows replaced DOS and again when the Internet replaced Novell/IBM/etc and again when .NET replaced COM. But in all of these cases, the change hasn't been 100 percent. Pockets of the old technology still exist. You can make a living working with it.
I'm convinced that WPF is the future. I've decided. I'm going there.
How about you?
Mainframes vs PCs?
I’ll take Mainframes.
While the PC industry has to recreate all their software to support the new WPF code, the mainframes will be continuing to run all the applications it has in either 24,31, or 64 bit modes.
There’s clearly still a major role for mainframes. I don’t think it’s a “either-or” situation where you do one or the other.
Your comment about the word length is intriguing. Nearly all CPU processors sold in PC’s today are natively 64 bit. But most PC operating systems are 32 bit.
You can also run 32 bit Windows programs in a 64-bit Windows OS in an emulation layer. This emulation layer simulates the x86 architecture. So PC’s can do about the same thing that a mainframe does.
Don’t get me wrong … I loved the old mainframe environment. Those were my first computers and I programmed on mainframes for decades.