Which is the best way to convert a .asp page to .aspx? Classic asp to asp.net.
I'm trying to avoid rewriting all the pages from scratch.
Thanks
I think it's a completely different language and you really can't avoid doing everything from scracth. I think that any solution other than starting all over would take just as much time and headache than starting from scratch.
It really depends on a lot of things. Mainly, how complicated the page is, and what it does. You will need to be a little more specific in your question, but there really isn't any single "one shot" solution.
My first shot at asp.net was migrating an asp application and there was and still is no straightforward migration path. The best that we found was so split the application up into functional areas then migrate each area - effectively running two apps with a bridge inbetween.
I always thought that ASP.Net was misnamed as it made it look like an upgrade to classic ASP which really don't believe it is. ASP.Net is more like an attempt to bring windows style programming to the web, abstracting away the stateless nature of the http request - certainly in it's webforms incarnation
If you are determined for a classic ASP style app you could include all the code on one page forgetting the page behind model though that would be unusual. If you can make decisions about the technology used you could consider MVC as conceptually at least it has more in common with ASP than the webforms. MVC admits it's a web app (like ASP) whereas webforms prefer to hide that fact under the covers.
Related
I have been looking at ASP.Net Web Pages and I think it would be a good replacement for some classic asp sites I am working on. There is a lot about them that is similar to how classic asp did things, so I believe there is a chance I can drag the other programmers into the present. My problem is that I have yet been able to find any indepth documentation to see if there is any "gotchas" I need to be aware of if I choose to go down this path. So if anyone knows of any, I could really use that information. I think going straight to MVC and Web Forms would be a bridge too far for the others at the moment. Thanks.
Wade
I found a link from Mike Brind - should I use WebMatrix to build a real-world website?
I'd suggest that Web Pages as a framework is probably the best next step you can take, but I would also advise that at least one person in the team takes time to understand the basics behind the MVC pattern. You may decide it's too much for the majority of the team at the moment, and that's fair enough, but you can use your knowledge to plan the development of the Web Pages site so that it can be more easily converted to MVC at some stage in the future, should you decide that's the way to go.
The things I would look at (coming from a classic ASP background myself) are functions and helpers. Decide on a data access strategy - The Entity Framework works well with Web Pages and can be transferred to MVC easily. Avoid the Database helper. Use Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 for the Intellisense option.
As Knox said, you have the whole of the ASP.NET framework available to you so there should be no Web Pages specific "gotchas", and it's a massive step up from classic ASP.
I've been using Webmatrix/WebPages/Razor for a while now and like it. It's been a while since I used Classic ASP, but WebPages to me feels like a true successor to classic asp and what ASP.net should have been from the start. I'm actually moving most of my smaller sites to the WebPages framework from WebForms. Here are some things I've encountered.
I'm not sure if this is a gotcha or not, but I thought I would mention that with WebPages the scope of your variables may behave differently. I know a lot of Classic ASP sites that used to use include files to run snippets of code. Many of them depended on global variables set in the parent document. In WebPages, if you use RenderPage or Helpers to replace includes they run mostly outside of the Parent's scope. If you used Server.Execute instead of includes then you might not notice much difference, but if you did use includes and lots of global variables you may notice it.
Another possible gotcha is in ClassicASP <%=%> doesn't encode output, but in WebPages the Razor syntax # encodes output by default.
Another thing to consider is using C# vs VB.net with Webpages. Although vb.net works you'll find that most samples, tutorials and people in forums use C#.
Finally something that bothers me is that it is named the "webpages" framework. I've found it hard to do a good Google search using the term "webpages". Even "asp.net webpages" brings back mostly webform results. I have more success using "webmatrix" or "razor".
Can't recommend any documentation but here is an introduction to Web Matrix on mikesdotnetting.com blog where he has blogged quite a lot about Web Pages with Web Matrix.
We have two production sites, developed using Web Matrix. One serves our customers, the other is an intranet for our staff. They've been running in production for almost a year. I'd say about 95% of the sites were developed purely in WebMatrix IDE with about 5% going into Visual Studio, especially for the occassional obscure debugging. We're happy with WebMatrix / Web Pages. I didn't use WebForms because I was concerned about WebForm's ability to do really lightweight pages, since many of our users are using cellular data on iPads or iPhones. I didn't use MVC because of the additional complexity, since many of our pages are just showing the user read-only data from our production database. Because WebMatrix gives you access to the complete ASP.NET library, I haven't felt held back at all.
We are currently converting our ASP pages to Web Matrix. We tried to do conversions using WebForms a few years ago, only ending in frustration. After a small learning curve on the C# and Razor syntax, our development staff feel that we made a correct decision in going with Web Matrix.
i know ASP.NET and i would like to learn and make a new project in ASP.NET MVC.
Is it easy to move from asp.net to asp.net mvc? Will the knowledge i have so far be helpful?
Im asking because i will have only few days to learn asp.net mvc and i want to know whether it's possible...
Cheers
I think you will find this questions (and its answers) very helpful.
Is it easy to move from asp.net to
asp.net mvc?
My answer to this would be a question back to you. Do you understand HTTP? Is web forms sort of magical to you, or do you have a firm grasp of what the abstraction is doing?
The reason I ask is that MVC sort of strips away a lot of the "magic" that web forms gives you in terms of treating a stateless protocol as actually having state. I tend to think of out of the box web forms development closer to classic windows forms development then normal web development. There are good and bad things about that.
What MVC is doing is bringing closer to what is actually happening in HTTP and in the end giving you more control and power over that. What you won't find in MVC is slew of drag and drop datagrid type controls, but it will make it easier to write AJAX heavy sites with common javascript libraries and clean html, as well as enable you to more easily write testable code.
Will the knowledge i have so far be helpful?
Without knowing what your "knowledge" is, it is hard to say. Obviously c# and vb are the same it's not like its a new language.
It really comes down to what type of web developer you were in asp.net forms. If you found yourself annoyed at how IDs were generated and how the html output of controls was horrible and that the framework was making it hard to do what you want then you should be fine.
If you were like I stated before, more of a drag and drop type of web forms person than MVC might be a bit challenging, but I would say its a good challenge and something that will ultimately make you a better web developer.
The only way you'll really know is if you try... There are tons of resources out there to get you started.
Hope that helps. Don't be afraid to ask questions on here as you go, there are tons of MVC devs on this site.
If you've ever used technologies like ASP classic, Coldfusion, PHP, etc. where you intersperse regular markup with server-side logic, then you will be able to pick up the "view" syntax pretty easily. The controllers are pretty simple to grasp once you get the hang of it, and the model shouldn't have to change from what you are used to. The hardest part for me to grasp when first learning ASP.NET MVC was the routing.
Like anything else, it will take some effort before you learn the "right" ways to do certain things, and you will initially be a bit less productive in the new technology. But in the end it is worth it.
Personally, I felt that ASP.NET MVC was far easier to learn than ASP.NET WebForms.
Run through the NerdDinner tutorial. It should take you about half-a-day. I think you'll find the simplicity refreshing.
I am new to the asp.net world (but not new to .net) and I have been playing around with various things to see how I want to architect a web application I am developing. In my playing around I have decided I did not want to use asp.net's controls, as I have done enough php and ruby on rails to be decently familiar with regular HTML, and a decent amount of javascript.
I see a lot of comparisons between asp.net webforms and asp.net MVC, however when ti comes down to it I am not seeing that much of a difference (and I'll admit that it's probably me missing the differences rather than them not being there). I already have coded my asp.net application using a MVC type of architecture (aspx has the view, aspx.cs has the controller code, and models are separate classes in the app_code directory).
If I do not intend to use asp.net controls and just intend to use pure html and javascript, what are the advantages of using the MVC framework? As of right now, the only one that I am seeing is routing, and I'm sure if I look more I can find easy ways to do custom routing without using the whole MVC framework.
Anyways, if anyone could go into details of asp.net webforms minus the asp controls versus mvc framework, I would be greatly appreciated.
You're going to find a number of differences and reasons to use MVC over WebForms but it's going to depend on whether those differences are important to you or your project. Routing is definitely a big advantage for MVC. Although you can implement custom routing configurations in WebForms it's significantly less intuitive.
Another big advantage is unit testing. Along with an IoC container and a mocking framework, MVC makes unit testing a cinch. It's much easier to isolate actions and behaviors with MVC and test those specifically.
A third advantage is that MVC will help reduce the spaghetti code you're going to write. If you're not planning on using any User Controls then it won't be long before you're missing the HTML helpers in MVC. The Html, Url, ViewModel, TempData, etc make working with raw HTML much easier.
The inherent validation in MVC is also impressive. It's getting better in MVC2 and now with the integration with client side validation libraries it will save you a ton of time and add a lot of functionality.
No more VIEWSTATE.
There are many others but again it depends on whether those features are important to you. Good luck with your decision!
ASP.NET MVC is built on interfaces, which makes it extensible, easy to write unit tests for, and encourages clean, loosely-coupled architecture.
If you're using 'classic' ASP.Net without using any of the server-side controls, there's not much of ASP.Net that you're using -- it's basically classic ASP with .Net instead of VBScript behind it at that point.
Giving up webcontrols is the biggest reason not to use ASP.Net MVC. If you're fine giving that up, I'd just use ASP.Net MVC and be done with it. It's got all the parts you'd need to write yourself anyway, and the parts you don't like, you don't have to use.
In my playing around I have decided I
did not want to use asp.net's
controls, as I have done enough php
and ruby on rails to be decently
familiar with regular HTML
Thats not a good reason to decide against ASP.NET controlls. The importand thing about ASP.NET is Viewstate. It allows you to use event driven programming in Webapplications. This makes a lot of things very easy and productive.
Anyway - as you know ruby on rails I guess you will pick up ASP.NET MVC pretty fast.
First up, if you use ASP.NET MVC you'll be using a supported framework that has books, online resources and hundreds of blog posts surrounding it.
Second, I suspect you need to play with ASP.NET MVC to see it's power. There is way more than WebForms in ASP.NET MVC. For many, the fact that WebForms is optional (you can use different view engines) is a major plus.
For me, the extension points, the cleaner code, and the unit-testability of everything I do are major reasons to never go back to ASP.NET "classic".
My recommendation to you is to get a decent tutorial (look for the Nerd Dinner tutorial), play with ASP.NET MVC, and find out for yourself.
Note: ASP.NET MVC is not for everyone, and if you're heavily into the post-back mechanisms in ASP.NET, or have a heavy investment in server and user controls, then you might not want to take ASP.NET MVC right now. But for your next project you should at least know what your options are.
A little setup:
Our shop has a mixture of different platforms. Almost all of our web development is done in classic ASP. We have a WinForms application in development that is being written using the .NET 3.5 framework.
The problem:
I am writing a webservice for updating information to this enterprise application. Most of the classes and business logic also pertain to the WinForm application. On top of this, there needs to be a way to maintain some data on a website. Because we use classic ASP, I have decided upon using a generic HTTPHandler to make posts to. I use an ASMX webservice to query since I get XMLSerialization for free. However, I know this is not the normal use of a Handler and can't help but think there is a much better, short of converting a bunch of stuff over. Doing just this much is quite a bit more work than the project timelines allow. Can anyone offer some insight on this topic? More generally, how have people converted from classic ASP to ASP.NET? We are not a very large shop, so I think we're going to have to take it incrementally.
As a follow up to this question, I am finished with the roll out of this project and it is working pretty well. The AJAX portion was pretty easy doing it this way. However I never got ternary operators to work in my handler page and I'm not sure why. This resulted in first checking the HTTPContext to see if the control I was trying to read was actually there, and if it was, taking in the value from it. I suspect I did something wrong but for now I'll have to move on and refactor later.
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I'm doing some maintenance on a classic ASP application for my client, and as I'm looking through the ASP, the following question comes to mind - would it be easier to convert a classic ASP app to ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET WebForms?
In many ways, it appears that at least the HTML of ASP might be easier to convert to MVC than it would be to rip out the HTML chunks and turn them into ASP.NET controls, repeaters, datagrids, etc. Plus having to add in handling and logic for ViewState, etc. might be added work.
I don't think my client will be requesting any upgrade like this, so this is just theoretical.
Let's assume that this ASP code is written very well (which isn't always true of course) so really the question is, will a best-case-well-designed ASP site migrate better to MVC than WebForms?
(Note that I'm very new to ASP.NET MVC, so I might be missing something crucial here).
It depends a lot on how the classic asp app is structured.
The server tag mixed in with HTML is similar to asp.net mvc but MVC is not as messy (or not supposed to be). You might be able to move the classic asp presentation code to a MVC view easier than to a web form. Also classic asp apps were usually developed with the statelessness of the web in mind. There probably is not anything in your classic asp that matches postabacks or viewstate. Classic ASP also uses normal html elements as opposed to asp.net webform controls. In these respects it matches MVC a lot closer than webforms.
If you do not know asp.net webforms or asp.net mvc I would say MVC is the way to go.
If you know webforms very well and don't know much about MVC I would say webforms is the way to go.
But, if your client for some reason does want a redevelopment of the site I would say go with MVC. It's always nice to have a client pay for part of your experience development as long as you can deliver.
On another note I'm always taken aback when I come across a client who wants me to do work on their classic asp site. In every single case the site is a mess. The worse part is that they are usually filled with huge security holes.
I think in a lot of cases it could be easier to convert to MVC than Webforms. Most classic ASP apps demonstrate very little separation of concerns so the biggest task is probably exactly that, seperating out the logic into data access, business logic, business entities and UI components. In doing that it could well be easier to convert the inline ASP code to a view, the business logic into controllers and the business entities into the model.
I don't think one would be easier to convert then the other.
You can code ASP.NET almost the same as you code ASP if you wanted putting a few crucial elements in the codebehind that you could access in the aspx. No databinding, no gridview and no repeater. The view state is there to help you can is easy to figure out, it is not necessary to use it if you don't want and can be turned off in the web.config and turned on with a page attribute. Web forms also have an AspCompat mode which allows access to Request and Response objects or asp, which will allow for page by page conversion if desired.
As for MVC.net, the method for displaying the HTML is quite similar. That in my opinion is where the similarities end. You would still need to separate out all you logic into the MVC model.
Coming from ASP and going to Web.Form and now MVC.Net I can tell you that WebForms were a little annoying/frustrating to learn, with 90% of the MS tutorials teaching you the worst possible habits IE (SQL connections on the page, dragging datasets around in designers). However, once you get past that one is able to do a lot of thing much more quickly then in asp(pagination or build a simple datatable with editing for example), I have however STILL never seen a large webforms project with an n-tier design that I thought was easy to follow, implement and use.
MVC.NET is like a godsend. It forces patterns and practices down your throat, it has strict rules that are adhered to by most. It allows for easy code coverage and separation of concerns. After being frustrated with webforms for years it finally feels like I am not hacking things together when attempting to do something that I cant drag off the tool bar.
I personally would try webforms so you will know how much better MVC is when you start using it.
There is more to ASP.NET-MVC than the apparent similarities between view code and ASP inline code. There is all the Model and Controller parts to consider which is very different from the way most ASP is written.
That said I would say that MVC would be the best place to start.
IMO WebForms attempt to hide html too much for my liking and may cause your project to take longer than you would like due to converting a lot of html into the webforms controls.
On the other hand MVC allows you to reuse some of this logic while making your application much more maintainable and with the appropriate Architectural Pattern your application can be developed and refactored much quicker than any WebForms project.
I say MVC all the way!
Either way, it's always best to start from scratch and implemented only the logic.
I started ASP a long time ago (more than 12 years ago) and only in 2006 I moved to ASP.NET 2.0, not even today I know all, but I do know pretty much what I do everyday at work.
In my opinion now, and looking back to my knowledge of ASP I would go to Web Forms instead of MVC, first, it's a language that it's in the "market" some some yeras now and very used across the world, while MVC is still in Beta, so, not suitable for production environment (says Microsoft - even if this site is written in MVC).
I do tend to make confusion with MVC diagram still, and there are more tricks than I want to learn if I need to do a fast change of one ASP project.
It depends. The ASP.NET MVC is no silver bullet and in many ways takes a few steps backwards in terms of developer productivity.
If you have a tight budget and need to get this done fast I believe ASP.Net is the way to go since it has the wealth of controls like grids, paging, validation etc that you can use right out of the box. Using these controls will no doubt save a lot of dev time. All of these controls that most consider pedestrian by now in ASP.NET all have to be created from scratch or taken from the Internet when you use the ASP.NET MVC project.
On the other hand if you have the time and budget now and going forward, and you want to have a solution that is rock solid, and more easily lends itself to test driven development, the ASP.NET MVC is probably the best choice.
Definately ASP.NET MVC is better in terms of style. (That said, you don't have to use Repeaters and other silly controls in a WebForms app, you can simply use inline code just like you would in MVC.)
MVC in general though would be an easier port, give you a better structure and be a more pleasant experience.
Web Forms is more object-oriented, while MVC is like classic ASP on top of .NET code. Model design should be the same using Web Forms or MVC. The only difference is that Web Forms has an object-oriented abstraction to the UI and MVC uses functions and code snippets instead of classes to organize UI code.
ASP.NET MVC is better than Web Forms for automated unit testing of the UI. However, automated unit testing in general is bad practice and even worse for the UI. Manual testing is the best way to build a quality application and to make the best use of development time. Creating automated unit tests is a waste of time and you end up with junk code to maintain with the core code. Lots of developers like automated unit tests because they think they are proof their application works, which is false. They also are trying to avoid designing applications using UML so they are using test driven development to design using code which is responsible for poorly designed applications. With TDD, you are refactoring code you wrote poorly without thinking about the big picture using models in the first place.
So MVC is useless. Web Forms uses a better object oriented model whereas MVC is more like old style classic ASP and other older design patterns. This is 2010 and MVC is dead. Web Forms is like ORM for the UI.