HiveMinds

single · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 3:23 pm Post subject: Moving to C# from ASP 2.0

I have a client who is just starting a brand new web project which I think has the potential of getting large. He already has an in-house CRM system built from 1999 which is all ASP 2.0. That project is slowly becoming a spaghetti mess as features are being piled on.

This is why I am trying to convince him to move to C# (OOP) and ASP.NET for this brand new project. I think had the CRM been built OOP we would be in much smaller of a mess today.

Unfortunately, since my client sees no benefits to him in terms of GUI and how the site works on the surface, I am having a really difficult time to convince him that C# can benefit him. He is afraid C# and .NET will cost him more for no apparent benefits to him. As a developer, I naturally see a huge difference but am really having a difficult time selling the improvements in site architecture, code reuse and OO since he only cares about the GUI.

Would anyone have any suggestions how to make a better argument? I really don't want to start a brand new project in 2003 using nothing more than ASP 2.0 which is what he wants.

C · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 5:49 pm Post subject:

Your client is right. There are no return benefits in moving to ASP.NET. Going up to ASP 3.0 will help though. I recommend going with Perl or PHP.

Of course this has a lot to do with me writing a paper on why ASP.NET will never fly any farther than the Spruce Goose.

single · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 5:55 pm Post subject:

Well, moving to a non MS platoform is not an option because of all the other systems and software he has. I just have to do with whatever MS offers and I was hoping I was going to get out of ASP 2.0 hell...

I would be interested in reading that article if you have it C...

Tim · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 6:36 pm Post subject:

The differences code-wise between ASP 2.0 and 3.0 are really minimal. And somehow I doubt that the server is actually running the 2.0 engine. If it is, it has probably been hacked so bad that it needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

ASP developers are easy to find. .Net developers are more rare and cost more.

The only reason I could see for going with .Net from a user perspective is performance. I have seen significant increases in performance going from ASP to VB/COM+ and .Net is supposed to be a big gain over even that.

C · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 6:41 pm Post subject:

You mention one of the points in my paper. Association of technology to platforms is on it's way out if not already out. PHP, Perl, Python and so many other technologies have advanced to the point of running more stable on windows than ASP and some other MS works. While slightly slower they are cross platform and almost totally portable. This is one of the pitfalls that MS has run into ASP.NET is not portable not cross-platform and has virtually no customer benefits.

single · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 8:14 pm Post subject:

Tim and C, I very much agree with both of you regarding other technologies. If I had the freedom to pick I would probably go with PHP or Java.

My client's business is however highly dependent on other things that I did not discuss yet. He is using the Verisign API for credit card processing and another company for Electronic fund transfers. He has standing agreements with both of these companies and has already invested lots of money in building the financial infrastructure at his firm for processing all this financial data. I do believe Verisign offers a Perl API but I know the other firm only offers a Java, C# and COM API. Currently we are using ASP with COM. None of these firms offer anything in PHP.

I do realize that there are many arguments against going .NET and I am very open and honest with my client that no, probably things will not improve much in terms of the GUI. He was also worried about the cost of .NET developers vs ASP which I agree with.

However, I also have a hard time believing there are no benefits in going to .NET and C#. From a code maintenance standpoint, I think there would be a huge difference. I also think, that not making the jump now, at the very beginning of the project, will prevent us from perhaps evolving the service in the future. Even though ASP and .NET are backwards compatible, I do believe it will be very costly to port the application to OO at a later point once a large procedural code base has been established.

ToddK · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 9:33 pm Post subject:

Oh, I better stretch first if we're going to have a fight.......

I fail to see what significant benefits Perl or PHP would offer above ASP3, let alone .Net.

If you want a better GUI then .Net offers you a possible solution in Rich Client apps, depending on your business needs.

Cynthia · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 9:35 pm Post subject:

single · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 10:20 pm Post subject:

Cynthia, I could not agree more.

My Client is very bottom line oriented, however, only in the short term. Unless he sees he is saving money for whatever he is doing RIGHT NOW, he is very difficult to convince of anything. That is my problem, good architecture only pays off in the long run but when it does, it does so many fold. I think even you Carl have to agree that OO architecture is far superior to any procedural based architecture for business apps.

He suggested to me that he will consider porting the app to OO in the future if he sees the app has grown big and people are using it. Even though I can see that he first wants the concept to prove itself before he invests large sums, I also know the porting to OO will never happen. It will simply be too cost prohibitive at the time to port a large application to OO, so the app will just become more and more convoluted as time passes.

Cynthia · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 11:33 pm Post subject:

Single, is there any reason why you can't just DO it in C# without consulting him? He would probably not know the difference.

You say it's a brand new development, but he already has a CRM in place -- pardon my ignorance, I don't know what a CRM is! Is it something that will have to be rewritten if you go to .NET?

For my last client, I said "This sounds like something that could be done with ASP.NET" ... and they agreed, fortunately, and in fact it was one of the reasons they picked me. But I was really just kind of thinking out loud, not asking their permission. My feeling was, as long as it got done and worked, they wouldn't care what I used.

Sometimes it's easier to explain something after the fact than to get permission. I ran into this when I was in the aerospace industry. Once, a co-worker and I had written a kind of modified FORTRAN compiler that made our development much easier -- it allowed us to compile this program on the VAX rather than on the clunky machine that it was going to run on. I kept thinking how much easier it would be to LINK it on the VAX as well ... but I knew I would run into all kinds of arguments as to why they didn't have enough money, there was no need, etc. .. So ... I didn't have much to do at that point, so I just wrote a linker, and then went to them and said, "Oh by the way, look what I did in my spare time ...." (which was actually ALL my time, but they didn't need to know that!). They were very happy with it.

I mean there may be a good reason why you can't do that .. but just an idea!
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Cynthia

single · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 11:50 pm Post subject:

Well, I think the main reason I don't want to be dishonest, especially when he for now has said no to anything .NET. Plus, I would need upgrade his IIS server to .NET and he would certainly notice that.

He could most likely not tell the difference between C# and VBscript but I do work in an XP (extreme programming) kind of environment with him so he is always across the hall from me. I do all development for him on site where he has a dedicated dev box for me.

Even though my client is mainly a business person, he was a script kiddy when he was young back in the late 60's early 70s so he knows just enough about technology to be dangerous to himself. Still, just because he coded BASIC back then he feels he can make just as informed tech decisions as I today. This naturally makes my life much more difficult.

C · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 2:05 am Post subject:

I am not advocating moving from ASP to anything else. But if you are going to do it then ASP.NET is last on the list. Maybe in about 3 years if it survives the next phase of Microsofts Roadmap. I don't think it will.

BTW, OOP can be done with ASP 3.0, you just have use Jscript. It can be done with VBscript also but it is harder.

Modulization of an application is easier in PHP and other languages but it can be done in ASP also.

You can't really use ASP.NET as an excuse to code better. You just have to code better.

the satirist · Specialist Bee Joined: 10 Nov 2002 Posts: 808

I think that suggesting the imminent demise of .net is at best disingenuous and at worst chicken little alarmism. So what if Microsoft rebrands their servers? That's marketing. The fact is that the .net framework is a solid technical architecture. I'll let Miguel de Icaza's writing on go-mono.com and elsewhere handle that argument though.
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England was once ours and we lost it -- if one can have anything or if anything can be lost.
-J.L. Borges

neilh · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 4:10 pm Post subject:

Sorry, Carl, but I think you're talking out of your, ahem, serial port on this one. ASP.NET is now the Microsoft standard Web development technology. They're not going to dump it, no matter what, any more than they're going to dump the .NET framework. ASP is legacy, and Microsoft will aggressively push you to stop using it for new code. IIS 7.0 will, in all likelihood, withdraw support for classic ASP, so they'll get you on upgrade eventually. Let's not forget that the standard IIS6 installation doesn't include ASP support either. That, if nothing else, should point you in the right direction.

ASP.NET succeeds in bring together the script coder and the component coder quite nicely, which could never happen in the days of COM. Since any ASP.NET app is, to a large extent, just a .NET class library, the skills are complementary. So once you learn to build ASP.NET apps, it's not a particularly hard task to learn to build class libraries, frameworks, desktop apps, console apps, and Web services. The learning curve to get to that point is very much smaller than if you were learning to do all those things separately on the older platforms. Meanwhile, you still preserve the language independence that enables you to choose to write pages in VB, JScript, Java (OK, J#), C#, Eiffel, Perl etc.

As Cynthia points out, ASP.NET is much, much faster than ASP. In my most recent project, up to 1000% faster. And that's not a typo. Add page and control output caching and you can reduce the load on your server by a serious percentage, getting far more work out of your existing hardware. No interpreted, script-based solution even gets close to this; not Perl, not PHP. ADO.NET is so much faster than ADO against SQL Server that it's not even funny.

As single says, ASP.NET is OO through and through. While I don't generally recommend writing 0-tier Web apps, you can keep your business logic separate in ASP.NET simply by writing your non-UI classes in .cs or .vb files alongside the pages; it all compiles into the same namespace. You can just as easily break this stuff out into separate DLLs and use them within your app - because it's all native there are zero interoperability or memory issues, and since you get binary inheritance you don't even need to ship the source to your client for them to be able to extend your code.

The .NET platform itself, meanwhile, gives you access to a host of stuff that you simply can't do in ASP without buying/writing COM DLLs. Need to send mail via an arbitrary SMTP server? Use System.Web.Mail. Need crypto? Use System.Cryptography. Need to actually generate code on the fly and compile it, then use it directly in your Web pages? Use System.CodeDom - the ASP.NET runtime does exactly that to turn your ASPX pages into compiled classes. Virtually any service that is available in Windows is available to you directly in .NET, and hence directly in ASP.NET.

For any new technology, there will always be those who prefer to stay behind - plenty of businesses are still on NT4 for exactly that reason - and sometimes this is for very sensible reasons. We are maintaining a host of older apps in ASP and will be doing so until at least their next major versions. But for new development, if you're going with a Microsoft platform, it's really a case of cutting off your own air supply to refuse to countenance .NET; sooner or later (and a lot sooner than you might think) ASP is going to become legacy enough that contractors will charge higher rates for doing it than the mainstream ASP.NET that is becoming their bread and butter.

Let's be clear about a few things. If you already have Windows 2000 Server, .NET will cost you precisely nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Download the SDK, the framework redistributable, and head over to www.asp.net and download Web Matrix, which is free (and comes with source). Yes, for the best experience you want VS.NET, which costs. But you don't need it. ASP.NET will give you immediate speed gains even if you just port your existing code into straightforward ASPX files. It'll give you even more if you move to the code-behind model. It gives you proper OO, and that is proven to reduce ongoing maintenance costs - if you do it properly.

ASP.NET isn't going anywhere, and if he sticks with the Microsoft platform, single's client is not going to be able to avoid it. If he gets ahead of the game now, he'll save time and money later. The only real challenge is proving it to him.

NH

Tim · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2003 5:34 pm Post subject:

Cynthia, you say clients should care about development time (which I totally agree with), but then the rest of your message is about execution speed rather than development speed. In your experience, is development faster with .Net or is the end performance of the app the only place you get speed increase?

I know that doing ASP vs VB/COM, asp is much faster to develop.