Bruce Gilham Jr.
Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015

LightSwitch generated your app. You cannot regenerate it, but you can read it.

Where you are

Microsoft announced the end of Visual Studio LightSwitch in October 2016. The apps still run, on a Silverlight or HTML client over WCF RIA Services, but the tooling is gone, so nobody can change them. The only people who can make sense of the generated code are the ones who built with LightSwitch when it was alive.

How the move goes

I built four production systems on LightSwitch, payroll, used-car wholesale, right-of-way appraisal and a food plant, and I have moved off it. The data model and the business rules survive; the generated client is what gets replaced, screen by screen, on a stack you can work in every day and your team can hire for.

Other platforms

Dead · support ended October 2021

Your Silverlight app has no browser to run in. The code still says what it does.

Dying · no new development since 2000

Classic ASP still runs. No debugger, no tests, and it is your problem now.

Dying · VB6 IDE unsupported since 2008

The VB6 runtime still ships with Windows. The IDE and the developers are gone.

Orphaned · the developers are retiring

Delphi is alive. Your Delphi 5 codebase, on components that no longer compile, is not.

Dead · support ended January 2015

FoxPro. Yes, still. Someone has to open it.

Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it

Your records are in Notes databases. Someone has to read the Notes data model to get them out.