Hi,

I am after some advice. Is VB suitable for developing an application that does the following:

Has userforms that can be accessed/input concurrently on a network drive by approx 60 users.

Pull in data from a number of text files and other sources and produce automatic and ad-hoc MIS summary reports/charts etc.

What dissadvantages might there be if VB is used for developing such an application?

If VB isn't suitable, any suggestion as to alternatives?

Any advise would be most appreciated

I'm by no means an expert but as far as I know the actual programming language should make no difference when it comes to the features you are concerned with. Supporting 60 users inputing data would be more of a concern with the data store. You would want to use a good database engine like mySql or MSSql and the code can be written to handle the database connection in any language. If you are looking to develope this application quickly or don't have much programming experience, my suggestion would be a language like VB or C#. The .Net framework also has alot of functionality built in for parsing text files.

AdmSteck hit the nail of the head. Yes VB is more than capable of doing what you want. Heck you could even write your own multiuser data source from within VB (but using something like MySQL or SQL-Server, or MS Access would be best as this is not really an area you need to go about reinventing the wheel unless you are planning a better wheel).

There are some problems with VB though. It is pretty platform dependant which may not be a concern now, but if you are planning on growing you may wish to think about. (.NET does promise to become a platform independant environment oneday). Java is another platform independant option.

many such programs actually implement themselves as web applications with the users connecting via a browser. This method can be a little less secure but it is pretty platform independant. This opens up languages such as ASP, JSP, and PHP.

VB is an outdated package. Microsoft himself has stopped support for VB6. But the biggest drawback of VB is you can't perform system programming or any low level operation.

You can accompalish it very well using VC++.

While it is true that Vb6 has lost the majority of its support, VB is by no means dead. VB6 continues to be a viable language that many developers are still using (dispight microsoft's decision to drop support for it.) There are also efforts underway to get microsoft to rethink its dismissal (though I don't really hold much hope myself).

VB does live on in the forms of VBS/VBA and VB.NET. All of which are still supported by microsoft.

The second complaint: "You can't preform system programming or any low level operation" although valid in some respects, this is a rather shallow statment becuase of course you CAN preform system programming and you definetly CAN perform low level operations. (In fact any programmer worth his salt should know this.) -- VB does not offer native support for such behavior because it was not designed for such applications, but that does not mean it cannot be done.

For that matter you CAN write windows programs/system programs/even operating systems in QuickBasic for Dos... no one really wants to but it CAN be done. Just about any Compiled language can do just about anything you want it to do. The way you need to go about it may be overly complicated but there is an old hacker addage, "If I can give your comptuer a command, I can make it do what I want." (Kevin Mitnick kinda points out an extension to this: "If I can get you to give your computer a command then I can make it do what I want." This is actually more or less the same statment but it points out the levels of abstraction that might be applied).