From .Net back to.?

How hard to rebuild in something else?

[Pibs]

Hi,

I have a little application, a desktop thing but since this is the .net forum I was kinnda hoping they're the same thing and someone could advise..

Basically I paid someone to produce this little application to my own design, and it's peachy. My problem is it requires .net 2.0 to run and no-one on the planet appears to already have this on their PC, meaning my little 5Mb prog' requires a 40Mb download.

This is killing my demo-trial rate. People searching for exactly this program don't bother to download it when they see the sheer BULK of the thing. These are normal people, they don't want to spend the next few hours waiting.

So my question is, just how difficult is it to re-write the thing in some normal sort of language or whatever so it actually works without downloading a new OS?

And what sort of language should I be looking at?

I know zip about programming languages, as evident by the fact I let the coder do this in .net.. so what would actually be the best language or languages for this? Just needs to run on Win98 onwards.

And would the fact the coder would have a fully functional version of the prog, with source, be a real help and make things super easy or not be much help at all and require a total rebuild?

I don't want to offer the work out to anyone until I have at least answered those 2 questions?

Please don't tell me how great .net it, it's a total non-starter for me at this time. I wish I'd never heard of it.

P

[Pibs]

First time round I think i was paying the guy to learn .net 2.0 :o/

I've been told VB would need the "ocx" files which would make it a large download. Is ocx the same as .net, sorta thing, but as you say probably already on the end user's machine?

One Java chap told me VB would need around 25MB. Is that true?

I do appreciate the help guys :o)

P

[vincevincevince]

The size of the package will depend on what you want to do. By avoiding using controls from different packages etc. then the VB executable can become rather small. I have made GUI VB applications easily under 300k. They require the VB runtime, which virtually everyone has.

If the code is made in a clean way without linking to external libraries etc. then it can be downloaded and run without installation. Not having any installation wizard etc. really does wonders for the file size.

[aspdaddy]

OCX is dependant controls, for example if you have an application that uses an excel type of display or web browser it might use an existing control installed rather than creating a new one.

When you package and deploy an app, you have a lot of options whether to include controls/libraries in the .exe for installation or rely on them being already installed.

If the code is made in a clean way without linking to external libraries etc.

Visual Basics out then :) . You wont achieve the above on a PC unless you write it in machine code (thats 1's and 0's)

[vite_rts]

Hi Again Pibs

You say your competiton has much smaller downloads?

Perhaps , you should be finding out how they do it,

Can you sticky the download category to me, at least I wouldn't be looking at your code :-)

[vincevincevince]

Visual Basics out then

Sorry, what I meant was, without linking to additional libraries etc., i.e. additional to the minimal ones you get with Visual Basic.

Start popping in things from OCX files and you start needing OCX files. Don't use any of them but recreate your functionality from more basic elements which are already included and keep the .exe file size right down.

All this being said we still don't know what the application's userbase or purpose is. Perhaps a command-line application built in C would be suitable (we don't know....)?