>>I can't thank you enough for the most detailed description of your project. If I ever get the time and a good knowledge of C# this would be the process I would follow. Meantime, I will print out your message for more study and a guide.
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>No problem. Definitely get people to crtically review what I have laid out. There are different ways to do this kind of thing. In doing that way I had a couple of goals:
>- I new I couldn't learn everything at once, so learning ASP.NET at one point, then pure C# at another, then SQL Server at another allowed me to learn in chunks
>- changing only part of the app at a time meant that it was easier to make it stable. For instance we new that the biz tier code was good and working, if there is a problem, then it is probably the new ASP.NET code
>- large projects have a lot of risk. I think gone are the days of 1, 2 or 3 years projects. Technology changesa and our users needs change. There is really no way these days to lock down an app for 3 years while you re-write it. Using my migration technique I was able to break down the largest chunk into 6-8 months. Still too long for me, but that was a short as I could make it.
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>I am only a single developer with a part time consultant that I can hand tasks off to, so can only do so much at a time. A larger shop might be able to blitz a project in 2-3 months and get it finished.
I am pretty much in the same boat as you are. Except I don't even have a part time consultant. I agree with your approach of piece-by-piece conversion of the app. My VFP application is monolithic and converting it to a 3-tier in itself a huge undertaking. I wish I had 3 months of uninterrupted work to do that first. The move to SQL Server and ASP.NET would be much easier then. But I am still struggling in understanding how to create a GOOD Biz Tier code.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham