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Good afternoon,

This may be too broad of a question, so I'll try to be specific. I work at a consulting firm which uses a variety of environmental models. Due to limitations of the GUI's which come with the models (most of these models are actually free, the software which makes them user friendly is not) we have developed a number of Visual Basic tools which expand the flexibility of the models. However, this has led to a fragmented experience, having to use multiple excel books and a tedious process.

We have the methods figured out now and I am starting to combine all the processes into one application with its own GUI. I want it to prompt user for data, show some graphic displays (such as bar graphs comparing results to a database of average results for QA) and be able to save a run setup.

I have little experience with developing GUI's so I thought I'd come here to ask the most important question: What is the ideal platform to develop my application?

It needs to be able to handle fairly large volumes of data, have a user-friendly UI (not for developing but for the end user) and would preferably the application be able to run on any computer without any installation. No web interfacing is required.

I have experience coding in VB, C++, MatLAB, and Python, but am open to learning any language.


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Looks like by "any computer" you imply "any Windows computer"... In such a case the .NET stack looks like the way to go. It's the de facto standard platform for Windows these days actively pushed by the OS owner company, so many third-party libraries exist for charting, rich UI etc. As to processing huge amounts of data... this does not really impose particular constraints on a platform/language, IMO. In the end, I'd go for .NET/C# (but you could just try VB.NET). –  kostix Aug 23 at 8:08
Thanks! What are the main benefite of using C# over VB.NET? I'm assuming (maybe incorrectly) that the language in VB.NET is similar to the visual basic macro development language which I'm quite familiar with. If there are benefits to C# though I don't mind learning a new language. –  HHains Aug 23 at 12:27
The apparent benefit is that C# is the language for .NET so 1) 99% examples in blog posts and other stuff indexed by Google will be in it, and you can freely substitute C# for .NET in your Google searches; 2) since it's a flagship language for the platform you could be sure it won't be discontinued (as it has happened to JScript.NET); 3) I would say it just looks and reads better. BASIC and its derivatives are an example of short-sighted engeneering IMO which tried to make a language look simpler for non-programmers as if non programmers would use it (they won't). –  kostix Aug 23 at 16:40
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