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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T22:01:58+00:00

I know Joel says to never do it , and I agree with this

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I know Joel says to never do it, and I agree with this in most cases. I do think there are cases where it is justified.

We have a large C++ application (around 250,000 total lines of code) that uses a MFC front end and a Windows service as the core components. We are thinking about moving the project to C#.

The reasons we are thinking about rewriting are:

  1. Faster development time
  2. Use of WCF and other .NET built-in features
  3. More consistent operation on various
    systems
  4. Easier 64 bit support
  5. Many nice .NET libraries and
    components out there

Has anyone done a rewrite like this? Was it successful?

EDIT:

The project is almost 10 years old now, and we are getting to the point that adding new features we want would be writing significant functionality that .NET already has built-in.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Have you thought about instead of re writing from scratch you should start to separate out the GUI and back end layer if it is not already, then you can start to write pieces of it in C#.

    the 250,000 lines were not written overnight they contains hundreds of thousands of man years of effort, so nobody sane enough would suggest to rewrite it all from scratch all at once.

    The best approach if you guys are intend on doing it is piece by piece. otherwise ask for several years of development effort from your management while no new features are implemented in your existing product (basically stagnating in front of competition)

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