Upgrade .NET 1.1 WinForm/Service to what?

Question

Hi Folks,

We have a current WinForm/Windows Service running in .NET 1.1 out on various customer sites that is getting data from internal systems, transforming it and then calling a Web Service synchronously.

This client app will no longer work in Vista or Windows 7 etc.. and its time to update!!

I was looking for ideas on what I could do here, I didn't write the App and I have the Business team telling me they want the world but I need to be realistic :)

Things the service must be able to do: - Handle multiple formats from internal system and transform to a schema SAP, ERP etc.. - Run silently and just work on customer sites (it does currently albeit .NET 1.1) - The Customers are unable to call our web service from their sites as they are not technical enough. - Upgrade it's self when updates occur (currently don't have this capability)

Is there anything I can do here other than upgrade the service to run in .NET and add a few more transformation capabilities e..g they want the customer to be able to give us a flat file, an xml file, a csv and the service transforms it and calls the Web Service?

I was hoping in this day and age we could use the Web, but automating this 100% rules it out in my eyes? I could be totally wrong!!

Any help would be gratefully appreciated!

Cheers. Conor

Answer 1

When you say that it no longer works on Vista / Windows 7, is this just because they do not have the .NET 1.1 runtime installed as standard? If this is the case then the quickest and cheapest thing for you to do could be to just to install the correct runtime on those machines.

Answer 2

It should be reasonably straight forward to upgrade the project to .NET 2.0/3.5, depending on whether your system uses a lot of deprecated APIs. Try doing a conversion and see how much pain you're in.

If you want your web service to support multiple protocols you will benefit from switching to WCF. However, this might involve re-writing the layer of code between your logic and the web service interface.

If you want to support different data formats, this will involve writing logic to do the transformation to the internal format. You could do this with adapter classes which expose service endpoints.

Self upgrade might be a bit more complicated. Click once deployment is probably the easiest way if you are in a position to host it.

If I were you, I would spec out the upgrade seperately from the features. Put estimates on everything individually and see what the business team is prepared to pay for.