I want very specific answer from the developers who did this and want to know how you resolved the problems you faced.
We have very big MFC (VC6) 32 bit application existing for 10 years. Now we would like to migrate it to .NET unmanaged 64-bit application. Here we have some problems, our UI should not change, we may need some managed .NET class for easier development, without affecting architecture how to add managed code with unmanaged code, lots win32 APIs might get changed to new APIs, should be run in XP, Vista, Windows 7 OS machine without any change, these activities should not be time consuming, new technologies analysis should be done as we are MFC programmers…
Pls share your experience and if you have any clear documents will be very helpful…
Note:
For the clear understanding, I am re-phrasing some points again. We want to migrate our VC6 native code 32-bit application to VS2008 (or VS2010) native code (unmanaged C++) with 64-bit support. The primary requirement is there should not be any change in existing UI. In Addition, if .NET supports the combination of managed code with unmanaged code, we can try using some features like .NET remoting in unmanaged C++ environment. And one more important thing I would like to convey to all is that we are not going to start any coding in C# or from scratch.
As Jerry has mentioned Joel talks about this in his blog Things You Should Never Do.
Moreover there are other things to be considered with this conversion.
PS: Most importantly by the time you fix and qualify your product in VS2010 i guess VS 2012 would have released 🙂