Is there a (relatively) painless upgrade path from ASP.NET 1.1 to 3.5?

Question

One of my clients has an e-commerce CMS written in VB.NET 1.1. (The original solution was authored with Visual Studio 2003.) It's not an enormous site, but it does consist of around 40 or 50 Web forms, and I'd like to upgrade it to .NET 3.5, and to maintain and continue developing it it with VS 2008.

I's sure I could do it surgically, re-creating the new project one file at a time, testing at each step of the way, and so on, but is there an easier way? I somewhat optimistically hoped VS 2008 would offer some sort of an upgrade wizard, but no such luck for Web Site projects, it looks like.

Anyone gone through this already? If so, what would you suggest as the most sensible approach?

Answer 1

I've done both ways - recreating the project one file at a time and also just leaving it. It took way longer than I thought to recreate the project, I ended up spending about 5-10 minutes a page on a site with about 200 pages. If I had known it would take so long I would not have done it. Only if you are going to be actively maintaining the site rather than the occasional update would I recommend investing that time upfront. (Then again, if you are paid by the hour... hmm...)

In projects since then, I've let the wizard upgrade the solution to VS2008 (changes web.config, references and your project file a little bit) then I just left the ugly code the way it was.

Answer 2

there are not magic buttons to do this. all applications need to be treated accordingly on how they were build. most of the time wizards make a good job but you need to execute a walkthrough code review in order to refactor and take advantage of the new Framework version.

wishing my customers also approve the framework upgrade to the applications. but most of the times they rather not to because of the time needed to accomplish it.