Lazycoder

Visual Studio 2005 and old web projects

Man, I’m having a heck of a time migrating our app projects to Visual Studio 2005. Well, actually to ASP.NET 2.0. I’ve got the projects converted over to the new format, including our web projects. But the architecture on this app is so horked and the way the web projects worked has changed so much in 2.0 that every fix-and-compile begats another 20 or so compile errors. Can’t find this, can’t access that.

One example, the folks that originally wrote this app constructed a “Common Fields” user control and it contains an “Error Message” user control (which just consists of a single span using an eval to output a private member var.). Well, since the “Common Fields” user control declares the “Error Message” user control, and user controls aren’t apparently aren’t included in the namespace by default, the “Common Fields” class won’t compile because it can’t find the “Error Message” class. So I’ll have to refactor that. This could be a lengthy process and it might not make sense to continue it. It might mean either leaving well enough alone or re-writing the majority of the web UI. Which really wouldn’t hurt my feelings any. I took over this project kind of against my wishes. The architecture is just so….

Well you know how a well poured black-and-tan has two distinct layers? You know what happens when you shake it? Someone shook the hell out of this app. The “Business objects” just pass DataSets directly to the UI. The UI enforces business logic, sometimes using client script, sometimes using server side script. The app is stovepiped from the UI directly to the tables. It’s very frustrating to work with. Adding a new field to any form means having to change at least two stored procedures, two tables (one main table, one audit table), the biz object for the form, and the code behind in at least two places (four if the field is a drop down list). Ugh.