New Occupation Direction: Visual Basic
The factory where I have worked for 18 years will be closing in about a year. I am the IS Manager, running a two-person shop, supporting an AS/400 running homegrown business systems and a Novell LAN consisting of desktop applications in a DOS/Windows 3.1 environment.
For the last 20 years I have developed, supported and enhanced COBOL business systems. System development is my true love.
I have done some work with Microsoft Access; however, I have found that, either due to lack of knowledge or the structure of Microsoft Access, I have lost the program control that one gets from development with COBOL.
What specific languages and/or development tools would you suggest I learn to get into PC-based system development?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Bob Felton
The most popular language for developing PC business applications is Visual Basic. If you know it, you'll never starve. And Visual Basic gets more and more powerful with every new version, so there's less and less reason to use anything else.
For systems programming, Dr. GUI and friends use mostly Visual C++ with either Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) or the Windows SDK. MFC does a lot to make Windows programming easier, so I'd recommend learning it.
But Dr. GUI recommends that you consider getting ahead of the curve, and learn some languages that will help you program for the Internet. While Visual Basic and Visual C++ are used for Internet programming, more programming is done in HTML and in Java—not to mention scripting languages such as VBScript and JavaScript. It's also wise to learn how to build dynamic Web pages, especially using databases and tools, such as dbWeb. If you can do some or all of this, you'll have a bright future.