Support Statement: Steps for Developing an ASP Site Upgrade
- Mark Juras
Q: When I just pick like 5 or 6 ASP files for it to convert, it does so, no problem, creates the VB solution perfectly, etc... but when I pick 506 files (the whole site, includes subfolders, etc.) it does not generate anything. I am using the exact same settings, just converting more files.... any idea what make this failure occur? It literally doesn't generate a single page in the deploy folder, just the BIN folder. I am getting all "green lights" on the process (takes about 16 minutes when I select all files), ... any ideas on why it is not generating the files???
A: The new project wizard is intended only to help you get setup so that you can develop an ASP site conversion. The wizard does not intend to be a turnkey process that does analysis, trouble shooting, and refinement for you.Â
 When we develop an ASP site upgrade solution, we typically follow this process: Gather
Gather site site content as described here: Upgrade Assessment Instructions
Use the Project Setup Wizard to scan and load the site directory and complete the preparation steps. The wizard will create your gmStudio project, qualify files as includes or pages, setup the initial translation script templates, and author the COM interface descriptions. You should not run any translations or reports from the wizard as this is time consuming and premature at this stage.
At this point, you are done running the wizard and you will switch to working in the gmStudio IDE.
Filter the files to just those with BuildType=PAGE. Build Type was identified by the Include Order process. Next validate all of the PAGES to identify the ones with missing dependencies. Resolve missing dependencies or remove defective pages. You do not need to work with include files: they will be analysed and translated as needed for pages that reference them.
Next, attempt translation for each page, one at a time, and examine the log to see if there are any translation errors or warnings. If so investigate and resolve.
Examine the results of each page translation looking for late bound code, and if so, try to resolve to a stronger type by adding type hints (registy-fixtype) or other rule-based techniques. You may use the Target code search to examine and tabulate search results.
Deploy each page translation as a single-page web application project and attempt to build it. Each web application project will include the translated page as a webpage class and all of its direct and indirect includes translated to code classes. You will need to edit the User Command Batch script to facilitate the directory setup, cleanup, and deployment for each test build.
Examine and resolve the .NET build issues using various rule-based techniques such as fixtypes and EditFile commands in a GlobalSettings file as appropriate.
Generally speaking once all of the pages translate and build individually, the combined site script also builds. Once all of the page translations produce a .NET project that builds, take those rules and integrate them with the SITE script that contains commands to compile all of the pages as an integrated set. At this point, you will have a full ASP.NET project for all of your pages that builds in Visual Studio.
At this point, you can may being to add the custom upgrades to do things like replace COM APIs , remove dead code, integrate hand written code, integrate runtime support assemblies, apply custom project and web.config conventions, etc.
Once this is done, you will have an ASP.NET solution that runs and has a structure worthy of debugging. You may then cut-over to finishing it manually, or you may continue improving the translation rules to correct defects in a systematic way.
At some point, the code will have no known defects and you can work on packaging and publishing the site to a more production-like environment.Â
Once the ASP\.NET site works well enough in the production-like environment, you can go live.
See Also