Hello,

I'm currently seeking some advice on some of the best ways to handle a website upgrade. I currently manage a website that was built using ASP.NET 1.1 and has its own programmed content management system. It is a data base driven website with about 50 pages built into the core .dll of the site and all other pages (apprx. 1500) are called in to content placeholders but are not included in the project build. The site has been functioning but since ASP.NET 2.0 was applied to our web server the site has begun to experience various code issues. I feel the time to upgrade has come and have already begun to build some smaller applications using the new ASP.NET 3.5.

I imported the project into Visual Studio 2008 to see what sort of challenges I might face. The first challenge is that the new studio environment seems to expect all elements (pages, images, etc) to be included in the project, is this true? If so, is this the best way to manage a .NET 3.5 website? Also, the new studio environment seems to be much more aggressive about debugging the currently existing javascript we have on our site. Currently, I can't effectively debug the content of the pages because of it's intense focus on the javascript. Should we minimize the amount of javascript we have on our site or should we make sure that it's included in the build?

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions you can offer.

If you use the web site project model of 2005/2008, then everything in a directory will be part of the "project" (I quote it because a web site project is really just a directory of files not a true project, with a file that manages it). However, if you use the web application project model you can fine control over the included files within the project.

When you talk about the javascript being included in the build, it's a little confusing. No javascript is compiled with an application build, but a js file can be a member of the project and thus visual studio will treat it in some way. Perhaps what you are experiencing can be dealt with using a VS setting. I'm not that familiar with VS2008 so I don't know what you might change, but I expect there's something that allows for turning off javascript checking or whatever VS is doing that's getting in the way.

__________________
-Peter
compiledthoughts.com
twitter/peterlanoie

Thanks planoie.

It will definitely have to be a web application project then. I'll have to keep looking further into the Javascript matter. I haven't found a setting yet but I may just not have found it either. I don't know if this will clear things up, but basically there is a javascript menu, and visual studio starts debugging it first and keeps coming back with messages that it cannot find different elements of the scripting. There are so many of these errors that trying to debug the actual page is only possible if I take it all out. Incidentally though the menu doesn't report errors in a browers when run.

You may also want to read Peter's own article on the matter:

http://www.compiledthoughts.com/2008...n-project.html

Here he compares WSP and WAP....

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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