Rewrite or repair?

Question

I\'m sure you have all been there, you take on a project where there is a creaky old code base which is barely fit for purpose and you have to make the decision to either re

Answer 1

Repair, or more importantly, refactor. Both because Joel said so and also because, if it's your code, you've probably learned a ton more stuff since you touched this code last. If you wrote it in .NET 1.1, you can upgrade it to 3.5 SP1. You get to go in and purge all the old commented out code. You're 100x better as a developer now than when you first wrote this code.

The one exception I think is when the code uses really antiquated technologies - in which case you might be better served by writing a new version. If you're looking at some VB6 app with 10,000 lines of code with an Access database backend obviously set up by someone who didn't know much about how databases work (which could very well be you eight years ago) then you can probably pull off a quicker, C#/SQL-based solution in a fraction of the time and code.