[scarface74]

The last company I worked for was just trying to move off of a PowerBuilder+Sql Server 2008 system that was written by contractors in 1999 and maintained by two developers who had been there for 20 and 14 years.

What was wrong with it:

- neither the version of PowerBuilder or Sql server was supported by their respective companies.

- they were dependent on the two developers not getting hit by the lottery bus. Good luck trying to hire someone who knew PowerBuilder and/or was willing to learn it.

- the only way to access the program by the remote offices were Citrix Terminals.

I was originally brought in to lead the effort to modernize the system [1] but they had a change of plans when I got there and I ended up leading a completely separate effort.

[1] the plan I proposed was to upgrade to a newer version of PowerBuilder that could expose the system as COM objects, write a C# WebAPI around it. Write automated integration tests calling the Web service and slowly migrating the PowerBuilder code to C# and calling the underlying stored procs directly from C#.

[cgrealy]

I'm not saying that old code cannot be bad, merely that it's not bad because it's old.

Your approach seems like the right one.