views:

262

answers:

3

In the very near future I'll be migrating some web applications from VS2003 projects to VS2005 projects.

What should I watch out for?

Anyone done this in the past and have it go bad?

How much time should I expect it will take to migrate a project?

I know this is more than one question, but please provide your experiences with anything relating to migrating projects from VS2003 to VS2005.

Thank-you

EDIT

The types of projects I will be migrating are Web Applications written in Visual Basic.

+2  A: 

Be aware of the differences between a Web Site Project and a Web Application Project.

darasd
+3  A: 

Do you absolutely have to go to VS2005 rather than straight to VS2008?

Even though Web Application Projects were implemented for VS2005, first with an add-on, and later with a service pack, IIRC, upgrading VS2003 web projects was extremely flaky.

We had a dozen or so production web sites (all written in VB.NET) running ASP.NET 1.1, and wanted to move forward... it proved a complete nightmare (even with Web Application Projects installed), and we gave up since we didn't have the resource available to persevere.

Then VS2008 came along, and I had another go.

Bingo, no problem at all. The project upgrade wizard just ran, there were a few trivial code fixes, and it just worked.

Straight from VS2003 to VS2008 in about an hour. All the sites ran off the same code base, and upgrading was as simple as copying over the folder, and changing the IIS management tool so that it specified ASP.NET 2.0.

I imagine you can guess what my recommendation would be!!

ChrisA
Yes currently this is a requirement to go to VS2005 since we have not purchased VS2008 to date.Thanks for your response!
Eppz
2003 - 2008 does seem like a breeze !
Preets
+1  A: 

I really would go straight to VS2008. You can 'throttle back' your project so that it 'only' uses .NET 2.0, if that's a requirement.

As far as what to watch out for - ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 are very different creatures, I've discovered. ASP.NET 1.1 let you put objects on a web page much the way you would drop buttons, labels and text boxes on a desktop forms application. This is no longer true in 2.0. I had a LOT of self-education coming to me when I started working on my current project in that I really had to learn how to lay out presentation-layer stuff with ASP tags (divs, style sheets, etc). The code-behind was still the same - handled better in fact. This all depends on what kind of web projects you're migrating and how they were written in the first place.

David