I need to decide if I am qualified to do a project. Qualified means able to do it in a reasonable time from the potential customer’s point of view. The customer thinks this is a 200 hour project.

I am an experienced VBA programmer, but that experience is almost exclusively writing procedures in Office and other VBA compliant applications. I have also used VB6 for a few personal applications. I would have to use VB.Net for the first time, and as I will explain, probably want to use OOP which I am only familiar with from reading in detail about it for years.

My actual core competency is industrial control system programming, which is done with special computers called PLCs with real time operating systems. It’s procedural programming. Each job is for a specific site…we never create packages intended for different users. What makes it hard sometimes is just the math and the complexity of the sequencing. The VBA programming is an adjunct…for example we may do data acquisition and then reporting in Excel or Access. Complex sometimes, but a lot different than making a shrink wrap program.

So now we have this customer who wants us to create the configuration tool that they would send to each of their customers. They sell filtering systems, usually in groups. A customer may buy up to a 100 filtering systems for the site. The tool I will design would allow the customer to configure whatever number of units they buy and have a pop up that controls each one. I might have a toolbar and have some drag and drop capability. (Seems like a good candidate for OOP so I’d want to get a bit up to speed on that.) Each unit added to the screen would have to have to talk to a Modbus communication driver, so I’d be coordinating with a programmer who is doing some of the communications part.

Is it even in the realm of reasonability to think I can create and debug this program in 200 or even 300 hours? Would it be risky? Insane? Plausible? Easy? I hope you have some insight to offer.

Is this to be a standalone executable or a web-based system??

If standalone, I would think you'd need 100 hours just to understand VB and the .NET form-oriented view of the world, give or take.

If web-based, an alternative would be to use ASP (instead of ASP.NET) so that you could use VBScript instead of VB.NET. Clearly not OOP, but VBS is much closer to VBA than VB.NET is. (VB.NET resembles VBA about as much as...oh, say maybe Excel resembles Access. My opinion.)