Suggestions for migrating ASP.net app from 1.1 forward

Question

I am recently in charge of an older app written in C# using asp.net 1.1.

1. Are there any resources to guide me in converting the application to a newer version of of the .NET Framework. My main pause is that there are ton's of customized DataGrids in the app as it is written now and since so much of the code needs to be rewritten to use GridViews ...
2. is it worth trying to convert the grids in the application to use Silverlight in the attempt to move this code into the future.

Answer 1

Regarding DataGrids - I don't think you have too much to worry about, DataGrids still work in current versions. It's just that going forward, you should use GridViews.

I am sure there are other things you may want to check into though, deeper framework issues. But I don't know enough about those things to speak to that particular point.

Answer 2

I had a similar experience, and the only thing that we had to replace was a third-party control that we were using in the 1.1 app, and the vendor had gone out of business an never released a version that worked with .NET 2.0. We ended up replacing it fairly easily with an AJAX Control Toolkit control.

Other than that, the compiler does a pretty good job of telling you what to do with respect to deprecated method calls.

I'd suggest making a copy of the code and upgrading the site in Visual Studio and see what happens. Just open the solution in Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, the IDE will walk you through the upgrade automatically. Get it to compile, then if you have any documented tests you should run through them. If not, you'll want to plan testing to make sure all your functionality still works like it did before the upgrade.

Migrating to Silverlight sounds like fun, but if you can get it upgraded and working, I'd probably push that off until a later release -- my experience tells me that you might get into trouble if you bite off too much at once if there is no show-stopping technical reason.

Answer 3

I would suggest that as part of the upgrade you opt to move to a Web Application Project rather than a Web Site Project, as the former is conceptually similar to the VS2003 web project model.

Here's a nice short post summarising the differences:

http://maordavid.blogspot.com/2007/06/aspnet-20-web-site-vs-web-application.html

As others have said, don't worry too much about the DataGrids, the upgraded site should be backwards-compatible in this respect.

Answer 4

This MSDN document may be useful to you as you upgrade your application, it contains lists of breaking changes between 1.1 and 2.0, and work arounds for resolving them:

Breaking Changes in .NET Framework 2.0