Have you ever burned your hands by some new and immature technology?

Question

I often hear people saying you shouldn\'t rush into adopting new technologies until they have become stable, tried and tested. There is even a joke on how it takes 3 versions to

Answer 1

Unfortuantly it cuts both ways. When we first started developing a large web-based app for on Windows, .NET had come out in beta - with a final release of .NET 1.0 not long away.

However because it was new, and we didn't know what was going to happen, how popular it would be, and whether MS would drop it six months later. So we stuck with the tried-and-tested VB6.

We're still having to maintain that VB6 legacy, and it's been restrictive for a while. Although it's not listed anywhere, we're getting paranoid that support for the VB runtime is going to be withdrawn at a given version of Windows.

That said, going the .NET route may have had its own pain: 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 came out fairly quickly after each other, each with (some) incompatibilites with the previous version. Thus having to migrate .NET platform would have carried a different risk. Less or more? Can't answer that one having not experienced it :-)

In the end, you can be damned if you do and damned if you don't. If someone can read the entrails to determine whether a given technology is going to succeed at any one time, then they shouldn't have a job in Software, and should probably go into hedge fund management instead, make loads of cash and retire early :-)