HIPAAsuite's .Net Strategy

Thursday, 08 April 2010 14:46

HIPAAsuite software is currently being re-written in Microsoft's C# language using Visual Studio.Net 2010.

HIPAAsuite's software products are written in Microsoft's Visual Basic langugage, version 6. This is still the most widely adopted software for business solutions and will be with us at least two more iterations of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Still, the language is getting old and Microsoft replaced Visual Basic 6 with Visual Basic .Net. Not only was the language replaced but all the building blocks that Microsoft provided to programmers changed too. The world of ActiveX components and COM Objects made way to the .Net frame work and they now represents the building blocks of any modern Windows application. Though a program written in .Net might look just like a program written in VB6 it is very different on the inside.

We chose to also replace the Basic language with the C# language for two reasons:

The machine code that C# produces is a little bit faster and cleaner than that generated by the Basic compiler. The .Net framework does not translate code into Assembler machine instructions but compiles into a Common Language Run-time (CLR) that ideally lets you write code in any high level language such as Basic or C. The CLR in turn issues machine codes. This explains also why some programs rewritten in .Net are slower than the old VB6 or C++ applications.
C# and its older cousin Java are now more widely adopted than Visual Basic and having more resources at our disposal will produce better code in the long run.

Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net frame work 4.0 finally represent a mature development environment that we decided to move while at the same time implementing the 5010 version of the HIPAA transactions. we will also take advantage of 64-bit operating systems as we believe that this architecture will become the standard in short time.