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 created using Visual Studio 2003.) This is not a huge site, but it consists of 40 or 50 web forms, and I would like to upgrade it to .NET 3.5, and also support and continue developing it with VS 2008 .

I am sure that I can do it surgically, re-create a new project one file at a time, check at each stage of the path, etc., but is there an easier way? I was somewhat optimistic that VS 2008 would offer a kind of upgrade wizard, but that kind of luck does not look like for website projects.

Has anyone already gone through this? If so, what would you suggest as the most reasonable approach?

Answer 1

I did both ways - I recreated the project one file at a time, and also just left it. It took much longer than I thought to recreate the project, in the end I spent about 5-10 minutes on a page with a site with about 200 pages. If I knew that it would take so long, I would not do it. Only if you intend to actively maintain the site, and not periodically update it, I would recommend investing this time in advance. (Again, if you paid an hour ... hmm ...)

In projects since then, I allowed the wizard to update the solution to VS2008 (I changed the web.config file, the links and the project file a little), then I just left the ugly code as it was.

Answer 2

there are no magic buttons for this. all applications should be adequately reviewed as they were created. most of the time, the wizards do a good job, but you need to do a walkthrough of code to reorganize and use the new version of Framework.

Desiring that my customers also approve of updating the infrastructure for applications. but in most cases, they are more likely not because of the time required to complete it.