Classic ASP and ASP.NET MVC side by side?

[shovavnik]

Hi everybody,

Has anyone had experience migrating a web site written in ASP 3.0 to
ASP.NET MVC?

Have you had difficulties getting the two versions to operate side-by-
side (to enable a gradual migration)?

Is it better to use special rewrite rules to redirect to the old .asp
pages, or ignore all .asp pages and use a different HttpHandler?

I couldn't find too much useful info on this kind of project on the
web. A couple of brief experiments demonstrate that it's probably
possible, but I don't know what kind of issues to expect (other than
ASP session and authentication management issues), so any info or
pointers are very welcome!

Thanks,
Noam

[Refael Ackermann]

It varies A LOT betwee IIS 6 and 7.
I have too much experience with this sort of stuff on IIS6, where it's possible, but have a few gotchas.

1. Session &User Authentication - Don't underestimate this. We overcame this with HTTP communication (ASP.NET making an HTTP request to an ASP page for auth & session sync)
   
2. COM objects. There's a bug in ASP.NET on IIS6. You MUST make sure that ASP.NET is the one that triggers loading of the 2.0 CLR (make sure the first page hit after an IIS restart is an ASP.NET page and not an ASP page). If the CLR is loaded via a COM call from an ASP page IIS will either crash, or (after installing a special KB patch) work in a degraded mode.
3. Call context / HTTP context - Some methods relay on an HTTP context being there. Remember that a COM call to a .NET object has no HTTP Context. (Also mixed ASP / COM called .NET require special attention to DB communication (connections / transaction).

That about it. WE had a large project running in mixed mode, and after ironing out all these issues it run well, and was even moderately performant.

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[shovavnik]

From your answer and what little I was able to glean from the web, a
couple of small experiments and a review of the code-base, it looks
like the cost of migration may actually be greater than just rewriting
the site in .NET, whether WebForms or MVC. In fact, because the
current site is already relatively mature, all the current business
rules are already represented in code. Of course, this would mean
freezing development until the new site is up and running.

Anyway, I've made my recommendation to the client and explained the
options, so now it's up to him.

Many thanks!
Noam

On Nov 18, 9:15 am, Refael Ackermann <ref...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It varies A LOT betwee IIS 6 and 7.
> I have too much experience with this sort of stuff on IIS6, where it's
> possible, but have a few gotchas.
>

>    1. Session &User Authentication - Don't underestimate this. We overcame

>    this with HTTP communication (ASP.NET making an HTTP request to an ASP
>    page for auth & session sync)

>    2. COM objects. There's a bug in ASP.NET on IIS6. You MUST make sure that

>    ASP.NET is the one that triggers loading of the 2.0 CLR (make sure the
>    first page hit after an IIS restart is an ASP.NET page and not an ASP
>    page). If the CLR is loaded via a COM call from an ASP page IIS will either
>    crash, or (after installing a special KB patch) work in a degraded mode.

>    3. Call context / HTTP context - Some methods relay on an HTTP context

>    being there. Remember that a COM call to a .NET object has no HTTP Context.
>    (Also mixed ASP / COM called .NET require special attention to DB
>    communication (connections / transaction).
>
> That about it. WE had a large project running in mixed mode, and after
> ironing out all these issues it run well, and was even moderately
> performant.
>