ASP TO ASP.NET MIGRATION

Migration from ASP to ASP.NET can drastically improve the performance of your applications. A software created using ASP.NET is more robust, scalable, reliable, and secure as compared to the software created using ASP.

ASP.NET, which is a new version of ASP, removes all the shortcomings of ASP. For example, it removes tier confusion from the code (by providing an easy way to separate presentation layer, business logic layer; and database layer), It allows code compilation instead of code interpretation, and provides CLR (Common Language Runtime) for built in garbage collection to avoid memory leaks.

ASP.NET, which uses .NET Framework, enables you to build globally distributed applications with Internet functionality and interoperability built into them. ASP.NET enables you to build platform independent software that can be easily integrated with any application developed on any platform and language that supports CLR.

The .NET platforms now support approximately twenty five .NET compatible languages as compared to ASP, which can support only two scripting languages such as VB Script and JavaScript. ASP to ASP.NET migration can open a whole new world of possibilities for your web-based applications. For example, you can make use of already existing XML web services in your code to add a new feature or functionality to your code. XML Web services can be utility programs created by any developer and can be made available through Internet world wide without worrying about the operating system and programming language used to create them. Consider a situation where you want to validate the credit card number of your online customers on your website. Instead of writing the code to validate the credit card numbers of the customers yourself, you can simply plug in the already available Web service providing credit card validation in your code. In addition, the ASP.NET migration can make the code of your application considerably small, easily manageable, and easily deployable. This part of the website discusses the benefits that you may get, after the migration of your application from ASP to ASP.NET with the help of Wiztek.

It provides all the valuable information in understanding the important aspects of migration from ASP to ASP.NET and provides a clear insight into the benefits of proposed migration. This essay enables you to understand the complexities in migration and how Wiztek enables a smooth .NET migration of your ASP code by providing you the best .NET migration solution. Further we are going to discuss the facts that you must consider before going for a migration and various migration strategies that Wiztek offers.

Benefits of ASP to ASP.NET Migration

Microsoft's .NET Framework is rapidly gaining momentum as a standard for business systems, both within an organization and for the external clients of an organization. The advantages of migration of your existing applications to ASP.NET are enormous and disadvantages are none. This is because all the features of asp are available in ASP.NET. Installing ASP.NET does not break your existing ASP applications. ASP.NET uses a separate file name extension (.aspx instead of .asp), separate configuration settings, and an entirely separate runtime technology. With an ASP application entire web server may go down if one application crashes but ASP.NET processes run in a different server space and in separate application domain. This saves entire web server to crash just because of one application. If ASP and ASP.NET are installed on the same computer, ASP pages and applications can continue to use the existing ASP engine, with no interference from ASP.NET. Some other benefits of ASP to ASP.NET Migration are:

Better Language Support: ASP.NET is platform independent technology and supports 25 .NET languages such as C#, VB.NET, and JavaScript. .NET Developers can visually create Web pages with the use of VB style drag drop feature in Visual Studio.NET IDE. They can use built in debugging, testing and deployment features of .NET platform for easy manageability of code. In addition developers can use over 4500 .NET framework classes that provides a number of controls for performance monitoring, logging, file upload, image generation, XML processing, data access, transactions, regular expressions, message queuing, SMTP mail and much more.

Event-Driven Programming: ASP .NET is an object oriented technology that supports event driven programming unlike ASP. Objects on a Web page can expose events that can be processed by ASP .NET code. Load, Click and Change events handled by code makes coding much simpler and better organized.

Improved Scalability: ASP.NET has removed the bottlenecks created by ASP sessions, which used to work well only on the server where they were created. They used to store the session data "in-process" on the web server, which was a cause of scalability bottlenecks on high-volume sites. ASP.NET stores session's data on a dedicated state server that can be easily shared by multiple web servers and on an SQL Server database too, providing a better scalability and availability of sessions. This has improved the server to server communication, making it possible to scale an application over several servers. One example of this is the ability to run XML parsers, XSL transformations and even resource hungry session objects on other servers.

Improved Performance: ASP.NET highly improves the performance of your code because it uses caching in code with automatic content expiration. This feature automatically expires and refreshes data from the cache. This automatically solves the problems of memory leaks from your application and improves the performance of your application. ASP.NET performs dynamic compiled execution of code, which allows fast retrieval of pages as compared to ASP, which requires each page to be interpreted when it is requested by the client. The dynamic compilation automatically detects changes in the code and stores the compiled code in memory to serve the future requests by the web server.

Easier Configuration and Deployment: ASP.NET use XML (extensible markup language) file within the application to store application configurations. The configuration files used by ASP.NET applications can be changed and uploaded while the application is running without restarting the server. The web applications are simply copied to the server without the need to run regsvr32 to register any application components and configuration settings.

Easier Code Maintenance: ASP.NET enables easy code maintenance because it separates presentation layer from business logic layer. Developers with relevant expertise in front end and back end programming can easily maintain code as compared to ASP, where a single file is used to write HTML, VB script, Java script, and ASP code.

We Accept Challenges

At Wiztek, we accept challenges to migrate any ASP application successfully to .NET platform. The application may be simple or complex, after migration, you receive all the benefits of migration of your application.

Although the complete migration of a site in one go is possible but Wiztek believes in modular approach. The decision to go for a modular migration or full fledged migration is based on the size and complexity of the application. The simple and small web sites can be migrated to .NET platform in one go but big, complex, and mission critical business applications must be migrated using modular approach.

At the time of suggesting a migration solution we also consider other factors that affect a migration strategy such as the migration goals of a company, complexity and architecture of existing system, budget, and other available resources.

Wiztek believes that a company willing to migrate its application from ASP to ASP.NET must not suffer losses due to the downtime of the business website. The migration process should be smooth and easy going without affecting the business of a company.

Wiztek offers a solution based on planned phases of migrations and enhancements and possesses strong product release management experience to manage old as well as new product versions. Wiztek simultaneously supports:

- Bug fixes for existing ASP system
- Development of the new .NET version
- Implementation of new features in ASP as well as ASP.NET based system.