Question:
My company, a strictly a VC++ development group, is considering developing a large real-time database/imaging application in both VB and VC++. What are the pros/cons of doing this, and would you recommend it? (We have little to no VB experience and would have to be trained or hire the appropriate personal.)

Answer:
You are virtually guaranteed to finish the project earlier if you write a portion of it in VB (assuming, of course that your VB programmers are competent).

Some of the downsides to using VB include large distributables and the requirement of many support files. But if you are using database libraries, you probably have a lot of this already.

Not knowing about your application, I will generalize by saying your best bet is probably to write the user interface in VB and call “down” to your C++ routines. Although VB can call into DLLs, things will go a lot quicker if you can “export” your functionality using Automation. VB is built around automation and you may have trouble trying to call “mangled” C++ function names.