We have organized a small conference called The Future of ASP.NET last Friday.
Me and Michal Valasek have been playing with the idea to do it for quite a long time, because since the day Microsoft announced that ASP.NET Web Forms is not going to be supported on ASP.NET Core, we have got thousands of questions from many people and companies. There are many ways to build a web application and it is not easy to choose the right technology. Especially when you are a developer with strong .NET skills but little knowledge of JavaScript.
We had more than 100 attendees at the conference and 5 sessions in total. We started with an introduction to ASP.NET Core, MVC Core and Razor Pages. Then we had sessions about Angular and React, and I had the last session about DotVVM - an open source framework which I have started 3 years ago and which simplifies building line of business web apps.
Most of the attendees still have some web applications written in ASP.NET Web Forms. Many of these applications are more than 10 years old and it is almost impossible to rewrite them from scratch - the companies and businesses rely on them and rewriting these applications would take years.
We have got a lot of positive feedback about the conference, but I have also seen a lot of sad faces. I have talked with several attendees and the sessions made them realize how difficult it is to rewrite the application and possibly switch to Angular or React.
Not only that the dev team needs to learn a lot of new things - new languages and concepts (Typescript, how modules work, REST API), libraries and tools (Nodejs, npm, webpack) and things like how to deploy these applications. It often means a change of the architecture of the application (building a REST API which exposes the business logic) or a complete change of the mindset (especially when you are switching to React which is functional).
There are also a lot of stakeholders (customers, managers) that need to be convinced that rewrite is worth the effort (and actually, sometimes it is not true). Rewriting the entire application with 10 years of history cannot be done in a significantly shorter timeframe. And finally, it is difficult to deliver new features while the team rewrites the solution.
Of course there are also some benefits: getting rid of the technological debt, introducing micro service architecture or CI/CD which can lead to a better quality and faster release cycles, the ability to make fundamental changes in the data model to reflect changes in the business processes and so on. The company will become more attractive to the developers because of modern approaches and technologies. But it is really a challenge and there are a lot of risks to take care of.
Modernizing Legacy Applications
That’s why I decided to make a demo of integrating DotVVM with an old Web Forms application. A lot of people found this combination very interesting and it might be the right way that allows to slowly upgrade and modernize their old applications while keeping the old parts running and maintainable.
I have took the source code of DotNetPortal, a largest Czech website about .NET development I have created with my friend Tomas Jecha years ago. The app is written in ASP.NET Web Forms, uses Forms Authentication, hosts some WCF services and things like that.
I have replaced the Forms Authentication with OWIN Security libraries, which was the most difficult part actually, and I’ll publish a blog post soon about how to make this happen. Then I just installed DotVVM NuGet package in the project, added the DotvvmStartup class, and implemented a simple admin section. I have created a master page in DotVVM, copied all the contents from the Web Forms one and made only few changes to have the same looking master page in DotVVM part of the app. Because of the OWIN Security, I have a single sign on both parts of the website - the old one and the new one, and because of the same CSS files and same structure of the master page, the user won’t notice that there are multiple frameworks involved. And I can easily integrate with the old business layer without the need to expose it as a REST API, which would include a lot of work and refactoring and changes in the deployment process of the application.
In case of a real business application, this approach allows to build new parts of the application in DotVVM while keeping the rest of the application untouched. New parts of the application can be implemented in DotVVM which is more comfortable than writing them in Web Forms. The legacy parts can be maintained or rewritten one by one. Some of them may become obsolete over time and can be removed completely. The team can also work on refactoring and decoupling the business logic, and eventually, all the old parts may be replaced and the application can be ported to .NET Core and possibly containerized.
Of course, even this process can take years and includes a lot of challenges too, but it can be much safer way to adapt to the new platform.