Believe it or not, there are still many projects for which original development began 20 or 30 or so years ago! It is hard to maintain and extend such software. Jung software developers do not know and don’t want to learn Delphi, Fotran or Clarion. The 3rd party vendors are sometimes not supporting the older platforms. The IDEs and operatin systems changed. It is impossible or economically not viable to migrate from old programming languages and environments. So to extend such software it might be easier to develop the new features in .NET. There are several ways of running .NET code from native code and we are slowly becoming experts in it. We are just starting the third project that combines an old software our customer needs to maintain with the new C#/XAML/WPF/WCF functionality.The procedure ist seemingly simple the an old application written in Delphi or Clarion is seamlessly conntected to the new .NET functionality we write using so called interoperability layer.
We are running our third project that uses this technology. We have a new customer that needed an interoperability layer on top of the new .NET API for CrystalReports. The new CrystalReports vendor (SAP) is no longer maintaining the old API that our customer relays upon. So we build an interoperability layer to provide the .NET API for his software. Having the experience we were able to quickly came up with the solution that is being tested right now.
