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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T18:45:56+00:00

We have a ten-year-old ASP application that we are considering planning an update for.

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We have a ten-year-old ASP application that we are considering planning an update for. We want to take advantage of the new technologies that ASP.NET has to offer, as well as the opportunity to fix some issues with the existing framework (the existing code-base is highly fragmented, nearly impossible to test, let alone debug, and the entire application appears to have been constructed according to the “Farmhouse Pattern”.)

To that end, it seems that the time has come to rebuild this application. But, we are a small business, and we simply don’t have the resources to either hire out the rebuild, nor to dedicate our small team of developers solely to the task of rebuilding (we’ve got other tasks on our plate, and can’t concentrate on this one particular task for the length of time it would take to fully reconstruct the application).

What, then, are some useful strategies we can employ to help us convert this app, without having it consume all of our limited resources for the duration of the re-write?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I agree with what Justin said; if you have a working application in place, you’ll need a compelling reason (i.e., money) to justify the expense in rewriting the application for a new platform.

    Although ASP classic and ASP.NET share a similar-looking syntax and some common coding conventions, they are very very different from each other. If you tried to simply copy-paste classic ASP code into an ASP.NET application, you might be able to get it to work, but you’d be missing out of a lot of the advantages of ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC (and their respective frameworks, of course).

    You can, however, extend the functionality of the existing site with .NET code through web services or COM interop. We have a 10+ year old classic ASP web site and I’ve used both .NET web services (.asmx) and COM-callable .NET DLLs to enhance our existing application. In both cases, I wrote all of my new business logic in the .NET component and provided a chunky interface to work with the existing ASP page. That allowed my .NET code to be very easily testable and still use our existing (huge) investment in our classic ASP site.

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