Disadvantages of bigger project in VBA

Question

i am new in project for company that have bigger enterprise/accounting system based on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Ms Access 97. This application is still alive, they

Answer 1

You probably need to ask the company a few questions first:

• why wasn't the project migrated to newer versions? Staying with one version implies wanting to kill the project in the long term. If it was not worthwhile to keep up with current versions, there probably also wasn't enough resources to maintain the application properly. This is most likely to kill a migration traject. Having to make up for 10 years of insufficient maintenance is expensive.
• building a large system in VBA was a bad idea 10 years ago just as it is now. Why should you believe management is going to make better decisions now?
• the correct way to handle this kind of legacy is to make sure that the maintainers reach their pension age just a few months after you stop using the software. When does management expect that to happen? Getting qualified people will become more and more difficult, the more out of date the technology becomes.
• migrating these kind of systems can be awfully expensive. How willing is management to make the investment now, when they have not been willing earlier? You need to come up with a strategy where you can make very small steps and use the newly written software already. Do not use plain .net/winforms/wpf. Make sure you invest some time in finding at least an application level framework. A totally different approach would be to use tooling like MOOSE to reengineer the solution.