We ended up converting an entire ASP.NET 1.1 web site to 2.0 in under a week. It turned out to be easier than I imagined - I estimated 2 people for 2 weeks, and it looks like it will be 1 person for 2 weeks.

I don't want to understate how many problems there were. In the project as a whole, there were THOUSANDS of warning and error messages after the conversion wizard that done its work. But because of the duplicate nature of these problems, it was usually a search and replace job to fix them. One search and replace could fix 50 warnings at once. And even the ones that had to be fixed manually, I could usually just F3 from occurrance to occurance and paste in the corrected code.

The site is now up and working. There is still a lot of testing to do obviously, but I am extremely happy that it has turned out so well.

I am a software developer. I make my living working with businesses to help them automate and improve their business processes. To tell you the honest truth, I make a decent living at it, paid more than the national average wage.

Outsourcing is now standard practice in my industry. In fact, other industries such as call centres, and even television animation have gotten into the act. I heard that the television show The Simpsons is drawn by several teams in India. American artists don't even work on that show any more.

So why am I not scared of outsourcing?

Well first, I do believe the practice has had some impact on my income. My hourly rate could be a lot higher if my talents were scarcer. There is a competition between the amount I make ($X) and the amount an Indian programmer will charge ($X/10 sometimes).

In order to justify the difference, I have to prove my value. Am I worth more than 5 to 10 Indian programmers? In terms of pure code output, no, of course not. 10 programmers can outcode me.

My value comes in the things I can do that a offshore programmer cannot. Is an offshore programmer going to understand every facet of a company's operations (technical and business)? No, generally you give them one task to perform and they do it. Work has to be packaged up.

Is an offshore programmer going to take vague requirements ("I need a daily report on yesterday's activities...") and turn it into exactly what the client needs? No, generally they need specific and very detailed requirements. Work has to be thought out in advance and documented.

And most importantly, can a client ask their Indian programmer to run a project for them, interacting with key employees and making sure the job gets done? No, generally they take the entire job, and don't integrate into an existing team well. They can only work on things independently.

So I feel secure. There will always be a need for me. And I've even worked with overseas programmers, supervising them. So I bring value, and my clients obvious see that too.

There needs to be a major retraining of our society as a whole. Well, maybe.

I was leaving a restaurant today, and saw a woman outside with a young child and a fully loaded stroller. Being the nice guy that I am, I went out of my way and held open the door for her. Waited for her as she was approaching.

No eye contact, no thank you, no nothing. Walked right on in without saying a word.

Seriously - I saved her some grief and she can't even open her mouth? Or smile?

(rant over)

Microsoft or Dell or one of Apple's competitors should do the following...

Hire that annoying "Hi, I'm a Mac" guy from the Apple commercials. Have him talking a-mile-a-minute about how great Windows now runs on the Apple Mac. Using Parallels, you can't tell the difference. Now you can run all your Windows software inside your Mac.  On and on about how, now that Mac users have access to Windows, they will never need anything else.

And after all that, have the poor "Hi, I'm a PC" guy say, "So why don't you just get a Windows PC then?"

Seriously, I just listened to a podcast on Parallels by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte (Security Now), and they went on and on about how fast Windows now runs on a Mac.... but didn't spend any time discussing the downsides to such a setup. "So if you need a fast version of Windows so badly, why don't you just get a Windows PC?" was all I could think at the end.

OK, perhaps saying "too easy" in my last post was asking for trouble. Because trouble is what I have.

I have a weird situation and I need some help figuring out what the solution is... Any clues, please email me or leave a comment.

We have a "base page" that inherits from System.UI.Web.Page. My base page is called "BasePage.aspx".

All other web pages of our application inherit from that. So "default.aspx" inherits from BasePage.aspx.

So my problem is that the codebehind page for BasePage, called BasePage.aspx.cs, has been saved in the App_Code folder. Now I don't know this folder or what it's for, thats my first problem.

Now all the pages that inherit BasePage.aspx now fail because the class doesn't exist.

If I move BasePage.aspx.cs out and put it at the root folder, then another page breaks about the BasePage class (one of our User Web Controls).

Ugh. I am sure once I figure the underlying problem out, fixing all pages won't be a problem. This isn't a problem relating to the number of pages, it's a problem every web site would have during a migration with base pages, web controls, etc.

So here is the status of my .NET 2.0 application conversion. I converted the 71568 lines of C# code and 38452 lines of VB code in the business object and services tier with little error. No errors really, just a few things that Visual Studio 2005 warns about that Visual Studio 2003 did not.

When I got to the web portion, I started finding lots of interesting errors. It's going to take a full day or so to go through them all.

All in all, it's not as scary a proposition as I thought. It's the kind of conversion that can be completed in a couple of days. I thought it might have required weeks before.

We have a rather large project that currently runs in ASP.NET 1.1, and we want to convert it to 2.0. Now it's not huge compared to some projects, but it's pretty big.

71568 lines of component C# code

38452 lines of component VB code

100401 lines of ASPX C# code

It should be fun seeing how the .NET conversion wizard handles this... I'll document my progress here as I go through it for the sake of posterity and the benefit of anyone else contemplating a rather large conversion.

Microsoft recently released a toolkit called Atlas at http://atlas.asp.net/

Atlas is an AJAX framework for ASP.NET 2.0. If you don't know what AJAX is, it is best described as a web programming technique where the page appears to update itself (or actually does update itself) without a full refresh of the page by the server. This can be automatic or at the request of the user viewing the page.

For instance, the up-arrow images on the left side of this page are AJAX-type controls that allow the user to alter their view of this page. This happens without a trip back to the web server.

An example of automatic updating would be a page with stock quotes embedded inside a news article (like http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/5x12BB8tQmtNw49x3nlsrfJ?siteid=mktw&dist=TNMostRead ), and every few seconds the stock quotes update themselves with the latest values, but the rest of the page stays the same. In this case, the web browser is actually going back to the server to get a new quote, and updating a small part of the web page with the new value. The reason this is useful is that full page refreshes are slow, and annoy the user by making the page flicker or become unreadable.

For a live example of Atlas, check out the official samples page at http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/

Look at the Accordion control. As you click the headers, all other headers collapse and only the one selected is open. Or try the slider control - a control not normally available in HTML web pages. These controls are cross-browser compatible with IE and Firefox.

I saw a demo of this last week and it was very cool. http://www.msdnevents.com/