The Enterprise Application Platform
The thing that always surprises us is the fact that we have to do much of what we have to do to produce our product. The complexity of enterprise application development is startling. You basically need to be an expert on about 10 things just to get started.
It occurs to me, and not just because we write and sell a .NET product, that a good number of owners of large VB 6.0 applications are about to become a little nervous. As part of a proposal for one of these companies, I was tracking down the support dates and end-of-life statements by Microsoft about VB 6.0. It says, basically, that the Visual Basic runtime (or an updated version) will ship will Windows Vista and will be supported fully for 5 years, and not so fully for 5 more years after that.
