A .Net 2.0 Migration Strategy?

An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a large organization where we use .Net 1.1 as our sole development language. We have many frameworks, applications and web sites that are developed in .Net 1.1, and these developments are by no means trivial since they are the result of an IT department of over 300 people and 2 years of development. It is my responsibility to develop a strategy to move to .Net 2.0, this includes the existing applications, new developments, integration, QA, live and development environments. Does any one have any experience in this (preferably at this scale) and can any one recommend any reading material that would help?"

Comments

Test test test

[Xtravar]

At work we're currently in the midst of migrating our app to .net 2.0. As trivial as it should have been, a *lot* went wrong - a lot of functionality is different, and it's not even documented. It may compile, and it may run, but not for long.

All I can say is... 1. get it compiling, 2. get it (apparently) working with some shallow QAing, and 3. pass it off to QAers, because they know what to test better than you do. Only after should you even consider utilizing features of .net 2.0 and enhancing the product.

Migration

[panic911]

I do have experience migrating several smaller .net 1.1 apps to 2.0, but nothing even close to this scale. I will give you as much information from my experiences as possible, and hopefully it'll be of some use to you.

The WinForms upgrade wizard worked pretty much flawlessly for each application I converted over, the trickiest part was setting up Source Control, and it was more of a problem with the source control solution we used (SourceGear). Good source control system once it's setup, but a real pain in the ass until then. There were 3 or 4 fairly large projects and a ton of small ones that all converted without a problem.

Not sure if you're using the web stuff or not, but that was where I had the most problems. The Web upgrade wizard is far from perfect. You should at least install the latest version of it from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=7cecd652-fc04-4ef8-a28a-25c5006677d8&Displa yLang=en

That version has fixed several issues I had, but also seemed to introduce a few new ones (or it was a cascading problem, that resulted in different errors when the originals were fixed). I've had to do a lot of tweaking on many aspx pages to get it to find the Code Behind and there were a couple projects that I had to re-assign all my event bindings with, for some reason, although that was with the old version of the conversion wizard so that is probably fixed.

If SQL is being involed in this upgrade procedure, that was a much harder process to get migrated. Tables, Views and Stored Procedures migrate fine and the Reporting Services reports migrated over.. ok (though VS2005).. but the HUGE hassle is analysis service, if you use that, don't expect it to migrate very easily. DTS stuff was pretty easy to migrate over.

Anywhere, theres my memory dump. Hope that helps in some way.

But that shouldn't work at all...

[Shag]

an IT department of over 300 people and 2 years of development

Wait... and you're saying they got something done? That's not how it's supposed to happen!

(cynic)

MS lifecycle and support

[$exyNerdie]

That's what you get for using Microsoft app platform. By the time you will move everything to .Net framework 2.0, they will have 3.0 released and you will have to go through this all over again. When I paid over $2000 to get Visual Studio 2002, little did I know that it only supported .net Framework 1.0. When v1.1 came out, Microsoft said you have to buy Visual Studio 2003. Now that v2.0 is out, Miscosoft says you have to buy Visual Studio 2005. Your VS2002 or 2003 won't take .net framework 2.0 and they don't give you a tool/patch to make it work. Just keep buying and paying $$'s...

Re:MS lifecycle and support

[popeyethesailor]

Another retarded slashdot comment/moderation. Newsflash for you:

YOU DONT NEED THE IDE FOR .NET DEVELOPMENT!

The .NET Framework SDK has always contained all the compilers, build tools, and everything one needs to get started. And there's a complete free software stack of .NET development tools, including Nant, NProf, Ncover, Testdriven.NET, Nunit, SharpDevelop, CruiseControl.NET, Log4Net, Subversion and a dozen others I've missed. I've regularly seen people sticking with emacs and the above tools, for their entire development work.

And guess what, if you need a nice,shiny IDE, MS is giving portions of the IDE too! The Express editions get most of the functionality, except for some enterprise features. The cost of development tools should negligible, in a large-scale organisation atleast. VS.NET 2005 is worth the money, IMHO. Its not a VB6 world anymore, guys. There're legitimate reasons to bash MS, but this is not one of them.

An On-topic reply.

[popeyethesailor]

Well, its not that hard. What broke a lot of things for us was the new Website template introduced in the ASP.NET 2.0 betas. To put it short, they changed the entire deployment model, and this pissed off a number of people. MS did a u-turn, and launched this. This made the migration work flawlessly, and you also get all the benefits of ASP.NEt 2.0 without code changes :) Read Scott Guthrie's blog frequently; there's good stuff there.

Side-by-side installation hasnt been a problem either. Both frameworks can co-exist, with a few tweaks here and there. The language (C#) has gotten a bit nicer. More shortcuts, faster development, and overall superb IDE support(VS.NET 2005). The deprecated features have been done for a reason, and overall the changes make sense. While the performance is a bit better, I dont know if its enough to make a business case. If I can, I would wait a bit more, till a Vista release; especially if I'm doing WinForms apps.