Thursday was the first day of our Update Conference Prague - the largest event for .NET developers in the Czech Republic with more than 500 attendees. On the same day, I also had an online session at .NET Conf – a global online .NET conference organized by Microsoft.
Originally we were thinking of setting up a studio at Update from where I could stream my session, but because I was speaking at another conference the previous week, there was not enough time for testing the setup. I am lucky that the venue where Update takes place is only about 100 meters from the RIGANTI office.
Same as last year, my .NET Conf session was about modernizing legacy applications, but this time not from the technical point of view. I focused on arguments the tech leads or developers can use to explain the risks and benefits to managers and other non-technical stakeholders.
I talked about security risks that are often seen in old libraries and frameworks, then about performance improvements of the new .NET that can translate to significantly lower infrastructure costs. I also discussed hiring and developer happiness - an important criterion in the long-term perspective. Most developers want to use the new versions to keep their knowledge up-to-date, and there is an increasingly large group of developers who started with the new .NET Core and never touched the old stuff.
Then I focused on planning and estimation, and recommended to prepare a “business plan” - evaluate not only risks coming from DOING the migration, but also from NOT DOING it. You can lead a few experiments to get the idea of complexity and make rough estimates based on the results.
The last important thing I mentioned was communication. In many cases, being predictable is way more valuable than deliver on time, for many legacy applications are only internal tools and the deadlines are often only virtual. Some developers complain that spending a few hours making a presentation about the current progress is a waste of time, and use the time to write code in a hope that the deadline will be saved. In reality, these few hours will probably not save the day, and the stakeholders will face an unexpected surprise. Clear and intensive communication can prevent this.
You can find more information on this topic in my new book Modernizing .NET Web Applications. It contains a detailed guide for migrating from ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WCF, SignalR, Entity Framework 6, and other .NET Framework technologies to their equivalents in .NET 8 and beyond, and much more.
I got several requests to publish the slide deck. You can find it below: