>>>People, like those of last assignment, who have invested lots of money and time into developing a successful product with a large client base. The clients are also hearing of the Fox deadend and are asking when the application will be ready for the .Net stage. Rewriting the application would require 3 years or more, where with eT compiler that could reduce the time to possibly less then a year. Plus add several enhancements that have pledge the application: 2Gig DBF limit as one of the big ones. If there is the ability mix language modules written in different languages (which I believe there is) then migrating the application would be much easier.
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>>Where are you getting the 3years or more? We have a huge application for SEC reporting, Portfolio and Book generation that has been developed over a 10 year span. We are rewriting right now in c# and Silverlight. Our development timeline is 9 mo (with 7 developers) to product on the street.
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>From your reply it looks like you never heard of term man-year for development of an app. Why couldn't it be 3 years or more. With the project you're working on right now does it mean that it would take 63 months for one developer?


First of all, you don't know what I know or what I've heard. Aside from your sarcasm, I don't think so. There's some loss in multi-man teams. Anyway, no huge probjects are one-man jobs, especially the size of our app with millions of lines of code. First of all, I don't know how many developers are working on etec... but I bet it's more than one. Its also disengenous to say it will take 5+ man years to develop as that has any meaning (other than to accountants). What our clients are looking at is how fast it can be out the door. They could give a hoot about man-years... they want new clients and satisied clients. In addition, we had 20% layoffs with no change in the time-line.