Maintaining ASP.NET Sites

[Christopher Reed]

Since I've several of your responses as well as your original post, I
thought I would just respond to all here.

First of all, your original premise has nothing to do with the technology.
If you went into a business that had only a COM DLL and nothing else (yes, I
have seen classic ASP applications just like this), then you have the same
issue as you seem to claim to be unique to ASP.NET. Secondly, when you go
to these businesses, are you sure that these websites are not third-party
applications and they want to hack the code?

As for the viability of ASP.NET, you need to look at more websites. I see
more and more businesses, including Fortune 500 companies, using ASP.NET in
their website development. .NET has taken off and it has apparently left
you behind. Classic ASP is scripted and will generally be slower than
ASP.NET. The ability to split code from HTML is probably the best general
feature that ASP.NET offers. Technologically, ASP.NET is superior,
especially since classic ASP will not be updated any more.

Sometimes, we fear what we cannot understand.....

 

[Jon Paal]

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.

I agree

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.

I agree - plus, I am finding that my customers don't like getting their work delivered as ASP.net, because they can't work with it
and they generally prefer to have the ability of tweaking a few things. So right now I have a hard time selling this technology!

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.

I have had such a miserable experience with the lite version (express), I have no desire to try the fully loaded Visual Studio.

 

[Dan Cioffi]

I thought this thread was a good example of the "Annie Get Your Gun
Syndrome"... "Anything you can do, I can do better..."

In a perfect world, code is written, stored in a safe place, fully
accessible only by those who need it. This code was well written, well
formatted & indented, richly filled with comments detailing every change
and the revision the changes belong to. It’s easy to read, easy to
retrieve. The comments in the code detailed function calls & Subs
called. It also listed every link to an external file and detailed the
use of same. If you had any question at all, the answer was spelled out
right there in the code. As a new developer, you had it all.
Unfortunately, this isn't real world.

Best Practices aside, not everyone implements them. Reasons usually are
cost driven. Most often, management understands they are throwing a
pair of dice something will not go wrong. So there isn't enough time to
document, the users want features implemented now, not a week later so
you can document your changes, verify backups, update change control and
document your database.

Look at .Net as a product. Not a development tool, a product that lives
and breathes on retail shelves. Where did some of the features come
from? Anyone ever notice that C# is pretty much Java? Why don't you
need to register DLL's any longer if you use .Net? I can remember way
back when I did my first website, I wanted a COM component installed on
the server. The host said "No, sorry, we don't install any 3rd party
COM components on OUR servers."

Part of the features of the .Net environment were created to get around
a lot of limitations website developers had with 3rd party hosting
companies. .Net provides a language that was easy to migrate from Java
(after all, why use that, it isn't Microsoft) and make it possible for
more and more websites to get from everything else and into .Net.
Software is a volume game. You need to sell lots and lots of copies to
make lots and lots of money. Selling software volume licenses isn't
enough, you need people buying retail copies. So forget cfm, php, asp,
etc, etc, etc. Move to .Net today. All you small developers, forget
Java and Cold Fusion, it's time to come up in the world and use .Net.

Unfortunately, there go those best practices again. .Net is high
maintenance. It is really for ENTERPRISE development where you can
maintain those Best Practices. Even then, it is still hard to migrate
from anything to .Net. I have spoken with dozens of .Net developers
over the years. Everyone that tried a large migration from VB 6 or ASP
Classic to .Net had problems from the start. In the end, everyone
started from scratch. And all those websites that are moving to .Net
every day? Some are still doing it after 3 years and aren't even half
complete. So that small one man shop maintaining a dozen sites for
clients? He probably won’t be moving any to .Net anytime soon. He’ll
play with it, start to make some changes to some sites to get a feel for
it. But I doubt very many of those guys are moving to .Net.

If you look at some sites, eBay comes to mind, they were a huge ASP
shop, using some heavy CGI implementations on the backend. They have
said no to .Net and moved from Windows to Java on Sun hardware. And
there is this one teeny tiny issue with .Net. Buy into it and you’re on
Windows Server. I’m not putting down Windows 2003 Server. I use it for
my websites. But with .Net, there isn’t any viable option for another
hardware and/or OS platform except windows. Yes, I know there are a few
options out there. Novell has Mono, the open source solution to run
..Net on Sun Solaris, Linyx and Mac. But these are too new and lack
sufficient field implementation for serious use. Time will tell with
these.

I contract for a LARGE phone company. Name starts with "V". You can
figure it out. A lot of the company has moved to .Net. A lot hasn't.
We are a 3 man IT shop (a Directror, 1 Developer, that’s me and 1 Help
Desk person) that works on it’s own without any direction from Corporate
IT. We work directly for a business unit. I work on an intranet site
that manages the work for a nationwide project. It's pure, classic ASP.
We considered moving to .Net. We ended up saying "No, stay in ASP".
Why? There go those damn "Best Practices" again getting in the way.
There isn't time to migrate to .Net. It would take us (as in me since
I’m the only developer) 9 dedicated months to build the framework. In
the meantime, the work continues in the field and the users want changes
to the application on a weekly basis to support the work. We implement
at least 20 enhancements a month to this application and about a dozen
changes and/or fixes due to business rule changes.

Unless you’re an Enterprise with a few million to throw at .Net, you
won’t be headed there anytime soon. Yeah, I know some small guys using
..Net by themselves. Go to any hosting company and ask them how many
sites served by a single server are using .Net. Not too many.

Like I said, “Anything you can do…” I can do it too. In some ways,
better or more efficiently than .Net. In other ways more efficiently
but not better, and some ways better than .Net but not as efficiently.
It’s a trade off. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what platform
is better, the work still has a deadline that needs to be met. And you
use the tool that allows you to meet your customers needs now, not in 9
months. Because if you don’t, someone else surely will.

 

[darrel]

Unless you're an Enterprise with a few million to throw at .Net, you

won't be headed there anytime soon. Yeah, I know some small guys using
Net by themselves. Go to any hosting company and ask them how many
sites served by a single server are using .Net. Not too many.

First, Good post Dan. I agree with much of it.

That said, we're in a simliar environment as you...2 person dev team. We
decided to go with .net for no particular reason, actually. Just that we had
to start from scratch, so figured since we're an MS shop, we might as well.

So, I think there are small firms/groups using .net, but I completely agree,
it's not really something you 'migrate to' as much as 'time to start a new
project, now's the time to switch to .net'

Like I said, "Anything you can do." I can do it too. In some ways,
better or more efficiently than .Net.

I completely agree. .net is great, but, as you said, really designed for
that ideal best-practices fully managed environment.

For many web sites, I feel .net is actually overkill.

Because in the end, it doesn't matter what platform
is better, the work still has a deadline that needs to be met. And you
use the tool that allows you to meet your customers needs now, not in 9
months. Because if you don't, someone else surely will.

Well said.

-Darrel

 

[dm1608]

It's time to pull out the popcorn.

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.

 

[dm1608]

I think MS just hasn't converted all their classic ASP applications to .NET.
I mean, if something is running fine and doesn't require much maintenance,
why would Microsoft need to rewrite the webpage? I suppose if they're bored
or just one a standard design across all their sites. As you will likely
fine... Microsoft website, including MSDN, etc., belong to many subsidiaries
of Microsoft. There isn't one "webmaster" guy that manages the entire web
farm. There are hundreds of small subsidaries that have their own virtual
directory.

As long as their applications perform within specs and following their
design and branding practices, then you will likely find a mix of ASP and
ASPX.

I think there was an interview on Channel9 with the IIS testing group
regarding some of this.

 

[dm1608]

Hmmm ---

You make reference to having "Best Practices for SourceSafe" and doing
"Thousands upon thousands of updates to several hundred ASP files over 5
years", but you failed to notice that one of your developers and/or vendors
published part of your website as a .DLL? Why is this ASP.NET's fault for
your companies inability to demand from someone that is updating your site
to document what they're doing?

I have a real problem with outsiders remotely accessing our servers and
installing junk. For starters... they never tell anyone what they're doing.
They change junk and don't tell anyone. They create folders and
dependencies that when changed, will cause the application to fail... which
in return will cause me to have to call them and pay them more money to
support and application that they impropertly delivered to begin with.
Catch-22. I see this all the time in IT.

I demand that they give me their setups, program files, source,
documentation, and whatever else they require for me to setup their
application and then I install it. I know I'm the one that will be getting
the 1AM phone call when something breaks or have to come in on a weekend to
fix something. Having someone else do it for me is a recipe for disaster
and you end up spending more money and time for it in the long run.

You sound like you're fairly component with ASP but you still failed to
notice that an application that is running on your webserver does not have
any source -- or you simply assumed that it did.

I don't believe you can blame the technology for incompetence.

 

[Raymond]

You missed the point, they DID convert. It didn't
work well, then they converted back.