The Underscore Archives

On 14/12/2007, Fraser Stephens <frstep at gmail.com> wrote:
> A question for the .Netters on [_],
>
> I think the product I'm managing is going to be facing the 1.1 -> 2.0 move.
> What are the issues with migrating a large .Net v1.1 project? And what are
> the benefits, aside keeping up with MS's plan to keep on making money?
>
> Thanks,
>
> F.

Quite an open question to be frank, depends very much on what the app
is and I've not run a conversion for a while so this is all from
memory. The first thing you need to do is ensure you have installed
VS2005 and all the service packs. SP1 takes an absolute age to
install, I ended up running it overnight (!) on my laptop so be warned
it looks like it hangs but it's usually doing something so set it
going and go away for a day!

Once it's all installed load in your 1.1 app and the wizard will take
over for the conversion, in my experience this has been a painless
process but make sure you've backed up in case of any problems. This
should (from memory) convert your solution to a web app. If you want
to use AJAX extensions and make your site an AJAX enabled one the best
way I found was to simply create a blank AJAX enabled solution and
copy over all the important bits from the config files to your app. I
didn't discover a way to convert direct to an AJAX enabled site.

I'm guessing if your upgrading you're probably doing SQLServer upgrade
to. In my experience the gotchya here was the fact that VS2005 will
install a development SQLExpress version which does not play well if
you then go on to upgrade SQL Server. The best bet is to do the db
upgrade first, otherwise you have to fully uninstall the SQLExpress
version first. We discovered this simply by messing about. This is all
running locally on the devel box, you're not likely to install VS on
the production, maybe.

Now I've not done a large number of upgrades and not on your scale of
pages but we did convert a good five or six sites with very little
problems and this is the sort of thing a LOT of people have done. Make
sure IIS knows its supposed to be using .NET 2 for the correct sites
and you can run 1.1 and 2.0 sites together from my recollection.

The advantages are big. Not only do you get a much bigger control
library but you get cool stuff like groups and permissions built in
just by running a few SQL scripts (and you get the controls to support
them), we extended the model providing really fine grained control
over what registered individuals could do and see. You move to C# 2.0
which gives you generics (true object typed collections for example),
true static classes which means you can do away with a lot of
singleton code, all the designer generated code is broken out of your
code behind pages making your code cleaner (hmm multiple class
definition), lots of stuff which is much better than 1.1 and too much
to go into here. VS2005 is much more stable and a LOT better IDE to
work with. I'm not a major tech head and there's probably a lot of
stuff going on that I've not even realised!

In summary we found the conversion pretty painless, we were dealing
with small scale sites though they had a lot of functionality (I dealt
specifically with insurance back ends so the front end was simplistic
but the back end admin was full). We did a ground up re-write of a lot
of code and took advantage of a lot of the 2.0 features. Now of course
there's 3.5 and Vista support, oh joy.

rick (not Rick)

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