ASP to ASP.NET

Visual Basic migration to .NET includes:

  • VB6 rich client migration – which represents the majority of migration projects I have seen
  • ASP to ASP.NET migration – aka vbscript migration
  • Access migration – aka vba migration (although Access migration often initially involves just moving the data onto SQL Server, retaining the Access UI)
  • Some other edge conditions – such as VB6 WebClasses

I thought I would have a look and see what resources are currently available to help with migrating ASP to ASP.NET. A good starting point is the migration area on the ASP.NET Developer Center. There is also an ASP to ASP.NET Migration Assistant, but (unless I’ve missed something) it targets ASP.NET 1.1 and not ASP.NET 2.0, so you’d have some work to do if you wanted to make use of the latest version of .NET. Regrettably the migration site for ASP to ASP.NET is looking a little neglected in other areas as well with a number of broken links. Perhaps this site is allowed to “decay” as “all” ASP to ASP.NET migration has already taken place as ASP.NET offered many significant benefits. Certainly I have no companies left that have pure ASP in their solution - at least that is what they told me :-)

In case you were wondering, there was no ASP.NET 3.0. The .NET Framework 3.0 was focused on WPF, WCF and WF and did nothing in the area of ASP.NET. There is ASP.NET 3.5 though, shipping with .NET Framework 3.5 and targeted by Visual Studio 2008.

By the way, if you did use VB6 WebClasses to build your web interface then you’ll find that the VB6 Upgrade Wizard in Visual Studio will handle the conversion to ASP.NET for you, giving you a choice of target framework.