Historically, in the mainframe world, we have seen relatively slow evolution of the technical infrastructure and long project-delivery times. This slower pace allowed developers to implement a technical strategy that used a proven technical infrastructure for major system components. The same sort of infrastructure must be established to develop robust systems for Visual Basic 5. Visual Basic 5 Enterprise Edition provides the opportunity for a powerful and flexible development environment, but only if this flexibility is designed into the project. It will be a hefty investment to get it right, and a very expensive mistake to get it wrong.
The technical infrastructure includes the hardware, the network, the operating systems, and the tools. All the elements of the infrastructure interact and are constantly changing. This interaction and change is one of the biggest risks. You must work out a method for developing successful systems in this environment.
Visual Basic has recently gone through two releases (4 and 5), both with order-of-magnitude changes in complexity that require very different approaches to development. We’ve seen Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows NT 4, Netware 4, and the Internet change the operating environment. Distributed objects and open host operating systems are becoming a reality. Hardware continues to become faster and less expensive. Utility packages such as word processors and spreadsheets have become development tools. The legacy environment, together with these and other tools, forms an ever-changing development infrastructure.
You must be sure of the robustness and performance of the infrastructure under the stresses of live running. If the infrastructure is not proven, then prove it! And keep on proving it!