Maintaining ASP.NET Sites

[Raymond]

They say it's easier, but has anyone tried
maintaining an ASP.NET site without the
source code of the dlls? This was not a problem
with classic ASP, all the code was almost always
just in text files, easily viewable and most importantly
readily AVAILABLE on the site, to anyone access to
the site's folder.

But just imagine, bunch of companies out there, managed
by non-technical people, who have had a bunch of outside
developers doing work on their site. At the
end of the day, they have several dlls sitting in the bin folder,
and no source code or project files available. Now you're a new
developer hired to fix bugs and extend the site. How do you
maintain these sites now without the source code of the codebehind
files? How do you understand them? Yes, you can add to it, yes even
extend the classes. But how do you fix bugs in the dlls without the
source code??? How do you even understand what the code does
exactly without the source code??? It's a nightmare!

In this respect I think classic ASP is way superior to ASP.NET.

 

[Marina]

The new developer that gets hired gets the source code that is left by the
outsourced developers. Those outsourced developers would be required to
provide the source code to the DLLs, and the non-technical people would be
in posession of this code when the old developers left the project. Thus,
the new develop would receive the source code and go from there.

I don't understand why you wouldn't have the source code??

And by the way, you can code in ASP.NET exactly like you did in ASP. You
don't have to use codebehind. You can have 100% of the code in the .aspx
files, and no DLLs whatsoever.

Maybe you should do your research before declaring ASP superior...

 

[Bruce Barker]

not having source code is an option with asp.net. turn off dll support on
your asp.net servers, and the source code will be required.

-- brcue (sqlwork.com)

 

[Raymond]

That's very nice in theory, but I'm afraid that in the real world
it often doesn't work that way. The source code is often
not available to new developers for one reason or another.

 

[Raymond]

Too late, you're the NEW developer. Dlls
have already been made and deployed into
the site. Now you have to fix bugs in them
without any source code. What do you do?

 

[Ravi Ambros Wallau]

An ASP application goes very easy to a complete mess...
Having source code with the page code is a thing that is being avoided in
many plataforms on these days, MVC is an attempt to improve this.
If you really can't access the source code and really need to change it, you
can do a "prohibited" operation, but that solves your problem if the DLL is
not obsfucated.
The key word in google is: Reflector

 

[Marina]

If this is ever the case, then someone in management didn't do their job
right if they allowed only the result of compiling the source code to
remain, and not the source code itself.

Basically, the only option is to start from scratch and rewrite the
application, since you obviously can't hack the DLL. And whoever allowed
this to happen just learned a valuable lesson.

This, however has nothing to do with shortcomings of ASP.NET. Like I said,
ASP.NET can be written exactly as ASP was, with 100% of the code in plain
text in the .aspx - so this is always an option.

 

[Guest]

Well, at this point what you do is whip out Lutz Roeder's Reflector, along
with the Assembly Decompiler add-in, and decompile all the DLLs so that you
can build a proper source solution.

And then, you require the source code as a matter of basic policy, or nobody
gets to work on your project.
Peter

--
Co-founder, Eggheadcafe.com developer portal:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
UnBlog:
http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com

 

[Raymond]

I programmed classic ASP for several years, very
intensely, including maintaining the types of code
that you call complete mess. I never found any
complete mess code that I couldn't understand
and maintain with some effort. Now with ASP.NET
I have to disassemble serveral DLLs, dozens of
classes, and make sure I can compile them back to
same DLLs, before even attempting to fix and understand
the code, to even fix the most minor of issues,
which frankly is much more daunting and troublesome.

 

[Ravi Ambros Wallau]

I don't think it's a natural choice to put all the code within the page.

NO reutilization;
NO separation between presentation layers;
NO possibility to have a guy drawing pages and another guy making the code.

Would you like to write all access to the data in your ASPX page? Possible
for few pages, completely insane for 100+ pages.
When you used to do ASP pages, didn't you used any COM+ componentes?

I think it's possible to maintain a good structure with ASP. But things goes
out of control very easy if control is not intensive.

 

[Raymond]

Team development with ASP was no problem,
as long it was done right. Frankly, it was not too
difficult doing it right, as long as you were
following a few simple Source Safe practices.

We must've done thousands upon thousands of updates to
several hundred ASP files over 5 years, on several sites, using a team
that often included up to 5-8 developers working on the same site.
So I'm astonished when people say that classic ASP site maintenance
was much harder than ASP.NET. It's a completely
bogus issue, unless you were doing a lot of COM component
updates. Yes, we used them, but sparingly. They were a hassle to
update, since they required server restarts.

Reutilization with ASP? Server side includes! We used them
all over the place. You could also accomplish quite a bit
of the code/presentation separation using SSI,
Server.Transfer and Execute methods, in addition to script
components, and vbscript classes. Was really never a problem
for me, even if code/UI were mixed.

 

[Neo Geshel]

Well, at this point what you do is whip out Lutz Roeder's Reflector, along
with the Assembly Decompiler add-in, and decompile all the DLLs so thatyou
can build a proper source solution.

And then, you require the source code as a matter of basic policy, or nobody
gets to work on your project.
Peter

Ooo! Good call! I was about to say something similar, but you’ve even
got the progs pegged! (I wouldn’t have know which proggies to use...)

...Geshel
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[Jon Paal]

you are right.

Classic ASP was simpler and therefore easier to learn, use and maintain.

ASP.net is hard to learn and use. ASP.net is improving but has a ways to go. Version 1 was a start, 2.0 is better, hopefully
version 3 will be better yet.

The biggest problem I see is the divided development community. Different languages and different development tools hinder
communication and learning.

Learning tools like Web developer express are painful to use because they are so sluggish in performance and make new users cringe
with annoying slow response time.

There is still not a good file based sql database which can be easily deployed. Access is still the only file based option, which
isn't all bad. SQL server Express is not supported by web hosts because of claimed security reasons


=====================================
Knowledge comes and goes, but wisdom lingers

 

[Raymond]

I just did a project that uses a simple file based
database using Datasets serialized to XML files. It
works okay for very basic stuff, though obviously
it's not a real database that can be managed without
some custom programming.

As for ASP.NET. I said it this three years ago
on these .net newsgroups, switching to it is not
nearly as compelling as ASP was in about '99.
That's why it hasn't taken off as Microsoft had
predicted. I remember projections back in 2002
and '03 from MS that had ASP.NET adoption
way higher by 2004 than it is right now in 2006.

It's not that I don't like it from a technical perspective,
I definitely like the common library, C#, the ease of
component creation relative to COM, Web
Services, besides other aspects. Windows app
creation is definitely much easier, and VS 2003
is the best dev tool I've used so far. Nevertheless,
from a practical point of view, for most sites, they're
better off with just classic ASP.

you are right.

Classic ASP was simpler and therefore easier to learn, use and maintain.

ASP.net is hard to learn and use. ASP.net is improving but has a ways to

go. Version 1 was a start, 2.0 is better, hopefully

version 3 will be better yet.

The biggest problem I see is the divided development community.

Different languages and different development tools hinder

communication and learning.

Learning tools like Web developer express are painful to use because they

are so sluggish in performance and make new users cringe

with annoying slow response time.

There is still not a good file based sql database which can be easily

deployed. Access is still the only file based option, which

 

[john smith]

That's very nice in theory, but I'm afraid that in the real world
it often doesn't work that way. The source code is often
not available to new developers for one reason or another.

That's a management/policy issue like others said before. We've NEVER
had such a problem before, and we're not expecting it to happen either.
if the previous developers (I'm not talking about ASP.Net in specific
here) leave you no source code and documentation there's a very big
problem. Either they've deleted it (and it is company property) *and*
that there is seemingly no standard backup procedures in place (even for
critical things like that, and no auditing either), it most likely also
means there is no source code control/management program in place (and
perhaps issues with team development), etc. I don't see why code would
all of a sudden go "missing" (can you imagine, say, a new developer
coming to work on Windows (or any other app) and all they have is some
DLLs and no code left anymore? No? well, it's the exact same thing). If
you want you can use it somewhat like classic ASP with all the code in
the aspx page itself. The ability for the code to be compiled is NOT a
bad thing. It rather sounds like your company has some serious IT issues
to look into. Code disappearing like that is practically impossible if
you use source control/backups and all. You can't exactly blame these
problems on the technology for not having made it impossible by
crippling itself...

 

[Raymond]

Well I can blame it on the technology, because
compilation to dlls is how most ASP.NET sites
are done, and that's not the case with classic ASP.

Like I said, these companies are managed by
very non-technical people. They are small
and have no in-house technical staff whatsoever.
They are entirely at the mercy of the developers
they contract. Once or if you come across this,
as I have, you'll appreciate how things work
in the real world.

 

[Raymond]

Also, go to the MSDN online library.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp
The whole things is running classic ASP,
by the people who invented, released, and
promoted ASP.NET 4 years ago!

What's funny is that I remember they switched
to using ASPX there a couple of years ago, and now
they themselves have gone back to using classic
ASP there. <LOL>

 

[john smith]

Well I can blame it on the technology, because
compilation to dlls is how most ASP.NET sites
are done, and that's not the case with classic ASP.

Like I said, these companies are managed by
very non-technical people. They are small
and have no in-house technical staff whatsoever.
They are entirely at the mercy of the developers
they contract. Once or if you come across this,
as I have, you'll appreciate how things work
in the real world.

No you can't blame it on the technology just because it doesn't prevent
people from making bad decisions, not implementing best practices,
having non-technical (i.e. people that aren't qualified, under-qualified
or even incompetent) making decisions and policies, etc. If they
decide to contract, they only had to ask for the source code (which they
should get in almost all cases anyways - except for 3rd party libs used
and such). That's poor requirements (and perhaps not contracting with
the right people - any decent contractor would ask questions like this).
None of that can be blamed on the technology itself. ASP.Net is vastly
superior to ASP in every aspect (a truly amazing framework, great
performance/maintainability, great languages, etc etc). So what you're
saying is they should have made it impossible to compile apps (which was
also possible in ASP as a COM DLL which you don't seem to object to)
instead of making it an option like it is currently (just because some
people have no clue), hence making the platform much slower overall and
lacking in comparison with Java and others (making themselves a not as
good/attractive solution as other development/hosting platforms i.e. a
second rate platform instead of becoming the absolute best in the
market)? And that would be better? Okie!

Didn't know I lived in the fake world, but I suppose it's good to know!

 

[Scott Allen]

What's funny is that I remember they switched
to using ASPX there a couple of years ago, and now
they themselves have gone back to using classic
ASP there. <LOL>

ASP.NET is behind the vast majority of MSDN. Read about it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/02/InsideMSDN/

 

[Scott Allen]

Like I said, these companies are managed by
very non-technical people. They are small
and have no in-house technical staff whatsoever.
They are entirely at the mercy of the developers
they contract. Once or if you come across this,
as I have, you'll appreciate how things work
in the real world.

I've seen the same scenario happen with VB6 solutions. The problem is
generally "you get what you pay for".