How to judge the work involved in migrating a website from ColdFusion to .NET

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+1 Q:

How to judge the work involved in migrating a website from ColdFusion to .NET

I am trying to judge the work involved in migrating our website from Coldfusion to .NET. At this stage all we want to do is create an exact replica so scope creep should hopefully be avoidable.

Does anyone have any suggestions for judging the volume of work required?

+2 A:

It's pretty much impossible to know this without knowing exactly what your application does and how it works, how big is it, what database systems and external resources does it consume? etc.

Also the biggest factor is going to be the programmers you have working on the migration. I would be looking for very experienced .NET programmers who are very familiar with ColdFusion. Are they hard to find? Are you hiring? I don't know.

Without knowing your application - or your programming pool skills and talents - it is really impossible to answer your question I'm afraid.

Ciaran Archer 2010-08-24 07:48:53

Sure fair enough it was quite a vague question. I'll try to expand a bit and thanks for your patience.We are a Museum. We have no programming pool so at the moment I am attempting to spec how much work is involved so we can hire programmers.Our website is about 450 pages. It has a MSSQL 2000 database with multiple instances and a Unity CMS. We have an online shop, process online payments and we use flikcr and youtube for some of our content.Our IA is not very good and our website will need restructuring = should we this as part of this migration or after?out of char.thanks alot.Sam

Sam 2010-08-24 23:47:55

May I ask why you have decided to migrate from ColdFusion to .NET? And what version of CF are you currently using? I think the fact that you set on moving languages might be making this more complicated than it needs be. A CF programmer could go in and understand the current setup and be able to tidy and restructure things in a more more elegant way. However, if you need the .NET experience then you need to find someone with strong skills in both - which will be harder. So I'd review the rationale for changing languages at this point first!

Ciaran Archer 2010-08-25 07:48:34

CF 7. Whether for good or bad the museum is moving to all .net and microsoft and they are very set in this. The website has had a lot of problems and the lack of cf developers here (sydney, aus) and the restrictive nature of our CMS means that we find it very hard to change - We have had CF developers in to do work and the CMS makes it very hard-we have a lot of workarounds and nothing really works that well so there will be a change and it will be to .net as the museum see that as the most supported option.Thanks Ciarán for your help-any thoughts on the time it might take?best,sam

Sam 2010-08-26 02:05:18

I suspect that if you get in a .NET consultant they could recommend a full re-write. Perhaps they will be able to shortcut some of the process by looking at the old code, but that would be my feeling. It's just my opinion though. You need to get a .NET professional to look at the site, and do up a project plan before you can determine how long it will take. That's the best advice I can give you! Complete ball park: 800+ page, CMS and shopping cart - you're looking at months rather than weeks of work in most languages. Best of luck!

Ciaran Archer 2010-08-26 08:29:58

Thanks Ciaran, I think that does sound sensible. Thanks for all your help.Sam

Sam 2010-08-26 22:07:00

Gartner estimates 160 lines of code converted per man day for roughly similar languages. That plus the size of your code base gives you a rough estimate, if you assume the ColdFusion is "like" C# (e.g., all the Coldfusion constructs translate easily, which probably isn't the case; then the conversion rate goes down).

Our web page on migration provides more details including discussion of pitfalls and alternatives.

Ira Baxter 2010-08-24 07:53:44

It appears that this response is getting "flagged". Would those parties please post an explicit response as to why? It addresses the OP's question directly.

Ira Baxter 2010-08-30 15:54:33

Migrating from CFM to .net isn't much easy. Because some core CFM functions ain't much easy to migrate to .net like . need to know more scope of your website.

ppshein 2010-08-24 10:56:18

+1 A:

You could perhaps ease your transition to .net by using New Atlanta's BlueDragon. It's ColdFusion, but implemented in .Net.

Mark 2010-08-24 14:11:41

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How to judge the work involved in migrating a website from ColdFusion to .NET

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