Bruce Gilham Jr.
Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015

LightSwitch built your application. Nobody can change it now.

Where the business is

Microsoft announced the end of Visual Studio LightSwitch in October 2016. The applications it produced still run, but the tooling is gone, so nobody can change them. The only people who can make sense of what it generated are the ones who built with LightSwitch when it was alive, and there are not many of them left to hire.

What I do about it

I built four production systems on LightSwitch, for payroll, used-car wholesale, right-of-way appraisal and a food plant, and I have moved off it. Your data and your business rules survive; the generated screens are what get replaced, one at a time, on a stack you can hire for at normal rates.

Other platforms

Dead · support ended October 2021

Your Silverlight application has no browser left to run in, and the people who built it have gone.

Dying · no new development since 2000

Classic ASP still runs. That is why it never gets fixed.

Dying · VB6 IDE unsupported since 2008

The VB6 runtime survives on Windows. The people who can maintain it are retiring.

Orphaned · the developers are retiring

Delphi is alive. The one person who can read your Delphi 5 program is not on staff.

Dead · support ended January 2015

FoxPro. Yes, still. And the business still depends on it.

Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it

Your records are in Notes databases. Getting them out without losing them is the job.