AJAX implementation for ASP and ASP.NET hybrid

Question

A little setup: Our shop has a mixture of different platforms. Almost all of our web development is done in classic ASP. We have a WinForms application in development that is being written using the .NET 3.5 framework.

The problem: I am writing a webservice for updating information to this enterprise application. Most of the classes and business logic also pertain to the WinForm application. On top of this, there needs to be a way to maintain some data on a website. Because we use classic ASP, I have decided upon using a generic HTTPHandler to make posts to. I use an ASMX webservice to query since I get XMLSerialization for free. However, I know this is not the normal use of a Handler and can't help but think there is a much better, short of converting a bunch of stuff over. Doing just this much is quite a bit more work than the project timelines allow. Can anyone offer some insight on this topic? More generally, how have people converted from classic ASP to ASP.NET? We are not a very large shop, so I think we're going to have to take it incrementally.

Answer 1

As a follow up to this question, I am finished with the roll out of this project and it is working pretty well. The AJAX portion was pretty easy doing it this way. However I never got ternary operators to work in my handler page and I'm not sure why. This resulted in first checking the HTTPContext to see if the control I was trying to read was actually there, and if it was, taking in the value from it. I suspect I did something wrong but for now I'll have to move on and refactor later.