move to web-based SW - platform-agnostic, so it’s pretty easy to support other OSes (oh, and you get mobile almost for free)
start submitting patches to get stuff working on macOS and Linux - once the barrier to supporting other OSes is low enough, they may let you officially support it
I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there’s no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We’re just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.
Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.
I obviously don’t know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn’t have all of the features, but generally speaking it’s a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.
Potential solutions:
I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there’s no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We’re just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.
Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.
I obviously don’t know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn’t have all of the features, but generally speaking it’s a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.