Programmer reluctant to move to .NET

  • Thread starter Thread starter ianw
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ianw

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask this. I have a large
application written in ASP/SQL Server. I am not a programmer. The guy
who has written them for me is reluctant to move to .NET. I'm concerned
that he is not plugged into the development community enough and not up
with the latest developments. I'm worried also because I could be
missing out on:
* productivity gains
* additional functionality
* a better experience for my users.
* and....

1) I would like people's views on the above.
a) Why the reluctance?
b) What benefits could I really expect from moving from ASP to .NET?

2) I would like to know what problems/issues are involved in moving from
ASP to .NET.

Thank you.
 
Benefits are many fold in asp.net over asp, but theres a learning curve -
your developers need to understand OO theory at least to make efficient use
of the new framework. Of course, this means you might need to invest in
training or at least time for self learning. Expect to see:

- Increased Performance
- Increased Stability
- Increased Developer Productivity
- reduction in TCO and time to market

The main problem is its typcially a total rewrite to move an asp app to
asp.net, so I support your developers reluctance to some degree.

You need a reason to move, not just to keep up with the market - deadline is
one of them. if you have COM objects develoepd in vb6 for example support
for VB ends in 2008, so you might want to plan around this. Also, consider
what is wrong with your current app that you need to improve on. Any
changes cost money, and moving to a new software architecture is expensive
so can you do it piecemeal?
 
Ian,

I would ask him what his arguments are, than we can maybe help you to
measure his arguments.

In my opinion is it in a newsgroup message to write all advantages and
disadvantages from moving from ASP to ASPNET.

However if your website has not any active element in it, than there is not
much to say from moving from ASP to ASPNET. (You can do it than as well in
plain HTML with some javascript).

Cor
 
Forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask this. I have a large
application written in ASP/SQL Server. I am not a programmer. The guy
who has written them for me is reluctant to move to .NET. I'm concerned
that he is not plugged into the development community enough and not up
with the latest developments. [...]
1) I would like people's views on the above.
a) Why the reluctance?
Click to expand...

I was working with a guy like that a few years ago. He was our web designer
and had developpped our web site in ASP. I wanted him to move to ASP .NET
so that both his web site and my window form applications could rely on the
same web service, avoiding having to do everything twice. Even though the
web site itself was really small, he never bothered learning and porting it
to ASP .NET. The problem was, apart from the fact that he clearly lacked
any motivation for learning new technologies, that he only had ever done
web design using scripting languages and that he had no knowledge at all in
object oriented programming, which is the heart of ASP .NET.

I believe that many web designers out there are in a similar situation.
Switching from a basic scripting language to OOP is a major step and
requires lots of time spent on learning. Some will be more than happy to be
given the opportunity to learn OOP but clearly some couldn't be bothered
and will resist until forced into it (note however that ASP still works as
well today as it did 5 years ago and that in some situations, keeping the
web site in ASP might be the best solution in terms of time and money).
 
Aside from other issues that have been addressed nobody said anything --
yet -- about a "better experience" that is much easier and user friendly to
implement when using ASP.NET 2.0. The use of MasterPages and Themes for
example allow broader support allowing visitors to the website to
personalize their experience. The use of Web Parts also supports user
expereince in that it allows users to drag and drop page elements they
prefer. That's the keyword in fact: preferences, which is fundamental to the
user experience.

This may be a very important issue to you in the UK as I understand the
government has gotten serious about compelling website publishers to make
their websites accessible to people with visual and other impairments.
ASP.NET 2.0 makes great strides in this area too.

ASP.NET 2.0 supports Membership, Roles and Profiles which make coding
authentication and access to pages and resources quite productive.

Hands down ASP.NET 2.0 improves functionality and provides a much better
experience than ASP/VBScript web development but learning ASP.NET is time
consuming as is the initial design and setup of applications. After that
however it reapidly becomes a much easier and faster to use. Nobody would go
back to ASP without being dragged kicking and screaming.
 
Thanks very much for everyone's input on this. It has been very
helpful. I think all points have been covered.

Ian
 
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