.Net 2.0 Migration Strategy Needed

.Net 2.0 Migration Strategy Needed

• india7

  Some notes from my experience:

  I'm not at the same size, although working with two companies both having around 20-25 developers/architects/testers each.

  We've converted a project during development from 1.1 to 2.0 (one year ago, and still working on - release in another year), with nearly nil problems. We've even had parts of the program as compiled modules using the 1.1 framework, and other parts using the 2.0 framework working just fine together.

  This means that you could establish a migration strategy of moving part by part over to 2.0, and let the applications and their modules coexist as 1.1 or 2.0 modules.

  I assume you're also switching to VS 2005 - which means that developers on VS 2005 must develope for the 2.0 framework. There is no option (as far as I know) for them to generate for the 1.1.

  Further, the new frameworks for web pages, like master pages, the 2.0 web part framework etc., changes the way sites will work. A website should be converted as a whole, although it could use 1.1 modules beneath (business logic, DAL layeres etc.)

  If you're having sites running with sharepoint (WSS or the portal) you must be careful about these sites. They require 1.1, and althought a service pack 2 for the WS2003 should make it possible to run using 2.0, you can't develop for it under 2.0 yet. Should wait for Office 12.

  The QA parts can be improved a lot by going over to 2.0, as you surely know. A migration strategy should take this into account. I'm thinking about unit testing and also the use of the Team Foundation server. The use of the last one will mean a lot for QA, project control etc. I don't know if VS 2003 can use it. But, I used the VS 2003 and VS2005 together for 6 months - working fine. Developers could use both tools, but the source control might be splitted for old and new code (dependent upon what you use today of course).

  
  

• ValenTientje

  As osiris points out, there are some large design changes as well when moving to 2.0

  Many front ends in particular ASP.NET may be looking at large levels of re-design (though if this is a large system that was using dynamic control placement I would actually look to keep that methodology as opposed to moving to master pages)

  My personal problems were largely in the lower areas, mainly persistence. Although I could leave things the same I ended up spending many iterations incorporating many of the useful new features (generics and the ability to seperately scope properties were huge ones).

  It will really all boil down to how well abstracted your code is to begin with. A few things which will make a giant difference are...

  1) Do you have unit tests in place
  2) Are you using dynamic control placement in your ASP.NET apps
  3) How are you handling your data access (does your current method even have a 2.0 version )
  4) Watch out for XML documentation, havn't checked recently but the last time I did nDoc was still under development for 2.0
  
  I think your migration plan will in general entail.
  
  1) Go through conversions
  2) Get it to compile and get a test release
  3) Test ... find bugs
  4) goto 2
  5) once everything appears to be stable from an outside perspective get it to a staging environment and ready for a push.
  6) plan on spending months of refactorring to take advantage of the new functionality
  
  Unit Tests are HUGE if you already have them, they can cut down the amount of time invested in the migration by an order of magnitude. If you are not currently using them, the refactorring process once you get a working version may be a good time to add them as you will be duplicating known functionality.

  Cheers,

  Greg

  
  

• Matt Garnham

  We have completed the migration of many projects to .Net 2.0. These are ASP.NET webs and class libraries. The conversion wizard in Visual Studio has done a great job so far. We downloaded the latest patch for the wizard last month. Very few errors. We did have to change our Active Reports and put them into their own class library projects and then reference them from the web project. If you have much code other that code behind in your asp webs this should be moved to class libraries so you can organize it how you like because the wizard just puts everthing into App_code.

  We had no issues with class library projects and I believe that these just basically got copied over to the new format and recompiled.

  We did not use any guidlines other than the standard ones that came with the conversion wizard help.

  
  
• .Net 2.0 Migration Strategy Needed