Migrating ASP to ASP.NET

Surpinsingly for me. I found that some friends were working on migrating an ASP classic site to ASP.NET. I was impressed to see that there are still sites in ASP classic at ALL!!!!

ASP.NET 2.0 provides so much improvements, you cannot even debug in ASP. ASP.NET 2.0 has better performance and easier to deploy. There is even Intellisense! These days is hard for me not assuming that all IDEs provide the developer aids like that.

Also migrating simple ASP classic code to ASP.NET is not that hard.

Let’s see a simple ASP classic page like:

<%

Dim objConn

Dim objRS

Set objConn = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Connection”)

Set objRS = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Recordset”)

objConn.ConnectionString = “DRIVER=(SQL Server);server=…”

objConn.Open()

objRS.Open “SELECT * from Items”, objConn

Do While Not objRS.EOF

     Response.Write CStr(objRS(“ID”)) + “ – “ + objRS(“Description”) + “<br>”

     objRS.MoveNext

Loop

objConn.Close

%>

Migrates easily to:

<%@ Page aspcompat=true Language=”VB” AutoEventWireUp=”false” CodeFile=”Default.aspx.vb” >

<%

Dim objConn

Dim objRS

Set objConn = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Connection”)

Set objRS = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Recordset”)

objConn.ConnectionString = “DRIVER=(SQL Server);server=…”

objConn.Open()

objRS.Open (“SELECT * from Items”, objConn)

Do While Not objRS.EOF

     Response.Write (CStr(objRS(“ID”).Value) + “ – “ + objRS(“Description”).Value + “<br>”)

     objRS.MoveNext

Loop

objConn.Close

%>

These are the task to do:

1. Remove SET
2. Any method in ASP.NET requires its parameters to go inside parenthesis
3. ASP.NET does not have default properties so elements as objRS(“ID”) must be changed to objRS(“ID”).Value and objRS(“Description”) to objRS(“Description”).Value
4. you must add the aspcompat=true property to the page because of the apartment threading issues
5. You should change statements like Dim objRS to Dim objRS as Object it is not an error but it will help you make your code more clear.

You can also download the Migration Assitant from ASP to ASP.NET from:

http://www.asp.net/DownloadWizard.aspx?WizardTarget=AspToAspNetMigrationAssistant