New Dev; Old Dog
Damn did you read my CV?
I find myself in almost exactly the same situation with a slight twist , I moved from Clipper\XBase to VB6 about 10 years ago as the App the company sold (Epos) was moved from DOS to Windows. ( IMHO Clipper is still way better for Rapid dev than VB-SQL.) The only way to getthe best out of VB6 is to get your head around "IMPLEMENTS" and it's version of inheritance\polymorphism.
An additional problem for us is the soon to be expired XP which by comparision is a doddle to install apps on compared to WIN7 and don't even think about 8 The nightmares of UAC, the virtual store directories lack of serial ports on new hardware etc..
Stateless Web Based Solutions have severe limitations for anything other than the simple data capture\entry or shopping cart apps. Want to print securely, or use a bar code scanner etc.. Yes JAVA and HTML5 may well offer more but the time taken to become Fluent, Elegant and Productive in a new language is going to be the killer.
As for the future, one of our sideline (non-retail) customers wants a remote data capture app for his field staff written in FIleMaker for iOS on iPads. It's terrible for anyone with any form of client server mindset. Plus would anyone seriously bet their pension on Apple being dominant in 5 years so requiring yet another career reboot.
My personal choice for a route outa' here is on the Android platform using a tool called Basic4Android, (It looks just like VB.) Purely because it seems to leverage my existing knowledge. But what to make, how to market it and will it pay the bills are the really worrying questions
The simple truth may well be that the days of "traditional" custom app, PC hosted, Software Development outside of sizeable companies who always seem to write their own, is over. Put simply, us Old Dogs might have seen the best of our carreers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
