I have a turnkey DOS package written about 15 years ago and routinely modified since, that manages most of my varied documentation production for my business. It is now struggling, largely due to the failure of Redmond to continue supporting DOS, so I shall soon be forced to rewrite the code in something like Visual Basic.

I would have to learn VB as I only have a general understanding of it, but that is OK, I have the time and (I hope) the ability.

What I am uncertain about is which implementation would be best.

I will not be coding for the web, just for a local network, and I don't need an all singing all dancing do everything suite. I just want a menu driven suite that will be calling Word functions to produce documents on a daily basis, no two of which can ever be the same, from a variety of modules, reading from Access, and processing and saving real time generated data in a suitable format for use later by other parts of the suite, (and possibly in a form that can be read by Sage Accounts). Ideally the suite would run on a number of workstations, with a central data server.

I can buy Visual Basic .NET Standard 2003 from Amazon for around ?76 but will pay more if necessary.

I have no problems with learning the language or designing the package I want, (I have the DOS package as an example) it is just the choice of the right tool.

So do I need to go for Visual Studio .NET or will the Amazon one be OK? (I know this is not an easy question!).

I have no plans to use the program for anything other than this task, and I don't want to make a career out of this!

Any comments much appreciated

Chris Lovelock