This is so cool, even if you might take it as mostly marketing (sorry in advance)…

Having spent many years using a Commodore 64, and owning “Print Shop”, “Loderunner”… geez, I even remember “Reader Rabbit”, but I think that was for my Mom’s school computers… the Broderbund name carries a lot of meaning to me… so when I saw their name on a recent case study for C#, it really jumped out at me…

The Print Shop 20 Uses .NET CLR from MFC to Ease into the .NET Framework

When Riverdeep wanted to write new features for The Print Shop in C#, it didn’t want to have to convert the entire 20-year-old C++ code base of The Print Shop forward into managed code at once. The existing 1.4 million lines of code were not structured well enough to turn into COM components or to convert into managed C++. Riverdeep hit on the unorthodox approach of hosting the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime inside their MFC-based C++ application, which turned out to work extremely well in practice.

It seems to me that a company that has been building a successful software product for 20 years, and building on the same code base, doesn’t make language and technology decisions lightly… so this is a very cool case study.