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We've a enterprise customer who have a large ASP.NET Web Form written using ASP.NET 3.5. They would like to enhance this website by adding new feature (big one) which is worth of 8 months job.

Basically their technology strategity going forward is to move everything in to MVC 4.0 using JQUERY, HTML5 etc.... For now, they would like to develope this new featuer using latest MVC 4.0 BETA (by the time the project is ready MVC 4.0 will be out).

My questin is is there anyway we can host both ASP.NET and MVC.NET application on same website without noticing any difference from user's point of view. example all the navigations must remain same but all the new feature should be (client based json, jquery, moderniz etc)

If some one could help me in right direction on how we can solve this problem will be great.

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  • Out of curiosity, is the move to MVC only because they want to use HTML5 and JavaScript? Because those things work just fine in Web Forms as well. Client-side technologies aren't really impacted by the server-side technologies that deliver them. Not that I'm against moving to MVC, I in fact encourage it. I just want to make sure the business is informed before spending the money. Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 13:53
  • @David - "work fine" is subjective. Certainly, you have to jump through hoops to make Web Forms html5 friendly. Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 14:04
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    @MystereMan: "Jump through hoops" is equally subjective :) If once has been using Web Forms as a drag-and-drop surface for widgets on which one sets properties and is done with it, then I agree. If one has always maintained fine-tuned control over the rendered output (for accessibility concerns, mainly, but also for easier interaction with the CSS designers) then the transition is pretty smooth. It's not the Web Forms technology itself, it's how one has used it. Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 14:08
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    @David - and which do you think is the most likely scenario? Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 14:12
  • moving towards MVC is for it's great support for MVC Pattern, Testability, routing, json response, lighweith HTML etc. Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 21:41

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The short answer is : Yes, you can.

The long answer will be a little bit more elaborated because there is some point that are really tricky.

We started a quite similar project at the company I work for. What I'll tell you is just the way we did it depending on our particular context and knowledgne at the time. Maybe there are some better ways of doing it.

We couldn't just do a "big bang" project (throw away the old one an put the new web site in place) because the web site is too big and the traffic is really high. So we've looked up the viable solutions. The migration is still in place but here some point you have to bear in your mind :

Routing

.NET Framework

  • Our old ASP.NET web site was built around 3.5 framework. We couldn't just update everything to the framework 4. We still have some libraries wtitten in 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and 3.5. What you have to update certainly is your application's ApplicationPool you're running on your IIS. The old one is .NET 2.0 and the new one should be .NET 4.0 if you want to run MVC in the same web application. We had a chance that there is no code behind in our pages. All the code behind is in the libraries (.NET 2.0) so the impact is smaller (that to let compiling code behind with the new 4.0 framework). All we did is to run .aspx and .ascx pages in .NET 4.0 putting in the web.config this line : <compilation targetFramework="4.0">. A .NET 4.0 application will load a .NET 2.0 library directly into the .NET 4.0 runtime environment. It will not use side-by-side execution unless you explicitly ask it to. Any libraries directly loaded by an application--either via a direct reference or an Assembly.Load--will continue to load directly into the runtime and AppDomain of the application loading it. This means that if an application is recompiled to run against the .NET Framework 4 runtime and still has dependent assemblies built against .NET 2.0, those dependents will load on the .NET 4 runtime as well. More information about it here : https://stackoverflow.com/a/6216650/261950

ViewEngine

  • If you put all the MVC folders (Views, Controllers, etc.) in the web site root directory, there will be no issues. If you put it in the new subdirectory (ex: ~/NewWebSite/Controllers, ~/NewWebSite/Views, etc.) you'll have to redefinie a view engine because the default search paths for view has changed and the mvc runtime won't be able to load it.

I don't remember if we run into other problems but the three I described are main issues I can remeber for now.

I hope this helps,

Thomas

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Thanks @Thomas. I will wait more responses before I accept your answer.
No worries ;) If you want more precisions don't hesitate to ask.

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