In a move away from conventional thinking, Mitrais has chosen .NET as the environment in which to migrate and upgrade a legacy graphical system for the mining industry.

Through a seat outsourcing arrangement, now in its third year, Mitrais engineers have been migrating the functionality of the application from its original Fortran and ANSI C foundation into the .NET environment.

The objective of the project is to create a more Windows-like application with added functionality and performance said Mitrais vice president of software development, Mike Page.

.NET was selected for the programmer efficiency and also for its support for graphical processing development. Apart from that, .NET has a declarative user interface language, Windows Presentation Foundation, which is equivalent to the legacy user interface declaration in the legacy system.

This makes the conversion and transition to the .NET version so much easier.

Mr. Page explained that until recently, performance was usually named as the main reason why developers used C++ as the core language in developing graphic applications.

Today .NET used in conjunction with Microsoft’s DirectX has evolved to the point where performance is no longer an issue compared to C++. Also .NET offers additional benefits in terms of developer efficiency.

“With C++, developers have to worry about memory allocation and management, and pointer addresses for example. .NET already manages those kinds of things and lets the developer concentrate on writing productive code,” Mr. Page said.

The seat outsourced team based in Bali team comprises a project manager, junior and senior software engineers and a software tester.