Looking for People to Help Test the new Web Project Migration Wizard in VS 2005

We need your help testing the upgrade web project experience with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0!

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, we have been working on updating the project migration wizard in VS 2005 to better address a number of scenarios we've seen customers run into with the Beta2 version.  We are looking for help to try out an updated version of it to find and fix the last bugs. 

We've backported the migration wizard to VS 2005 Beta2 to enable you to try and test it without having to upgrade and install a new VS 2005 build (note: the build below only works with Beta2 -- build 50215.45 only).  Because it only runs on Beta2, it means that some of the compat issues that people have run into which require project model or code editor changes (no ability to exclude a file from build, as well as the ability to make solution to solution dynamic references) can't be tested with the below binary.  These two issues (and a few more) have been addressed in later builds, though, and will show up in release candidate builds and the final release of the product.

Some of the big migration issues this wizard does fix include:

1. Handle code-behind to code-behind assembly references (one page using the object model of another page directly)
2. Allow stand-alone class files in a web project to access web forms and user controls
3. Handle extra classes, structs, etc., found in code-behind files that are shared across multiple code-behinds

You can download the new binaries here (http://www.virtualgoldfarb.com/samples/NewMigration2.zip)

It contains two Beta 2-compatible libraries which you can replace in your Beta 2 installation of Visual Studio 2005/VWD Express.
Please follow the steps found in the README file in the zip file to install the updated upgrade wizard.
A white paper outlining common upgrade issues can be found here with even more information at the upgrade center on MSDN

Once installed, Visual Studio 2005 will then prompt you to convert your ASP.NET 1.x web application when they are opened in the VS 2005 IDE. Our goal is to minimize the amount of coding you need to do manually after running the migration wizard and we need your help.

To measure how successful the migration wizard performs, we ask you to send in a simple 3 question survey (see below), along with your conversion report and any reported error and warnings to webwish@microsoft.com

Survey:
1. Did your web application BUILD after the migration wizard was done?
2. Did your web application run after the migration wizard was done?
3. If not, then how long did it take to fix the build and/or run-time issues?
    a. less than an hour
    b. 1-4 hours
    c. 4-8 hours
    d. more than 8 hours
    e. Unable to finish migration yet

Remember, please send your survey to webwish@microsoft.com and attach your conversion report (found in your web application folder) along with any errors and/or warnings shown in Visual Studio 2005 when you build or run your project.

Thank you for helping us, we'd really like any feedback or bugs you discover with the wizard.  Even if you have already upgraded a V1.1 app to V2.0, it would be great to have you go back and re-run the wizard and have you tell us how well it went.

Thanks,

Scott

10 Comments

  • Hey Scott, yes I am on the test :-)

    I will have some results by tomorrow

  • Hi Tom,



    Thanks for pointing me to that post -- I just responded.



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE IS WHETHER DAMAGES INDUCED CAN BE RECOVERABLE OR NOT. SUPPOSE DAMAGES ARE DONE TO MY COMPUTER, WHETHER I CAN OBTAIN ANY COMPENSATION WHICH IS SUFFICIENT TO REINSTATE MY COMPUTER'S SUPERIOR FUNCTIONALITIES.

  • Hi Christopher,



    This is beta software, so no guarentees are made (it is install at your own risk). The migration wizard does make a backup of your current project before converting it, although it would be a good best practice to create a back-up of your own prior to running it if you want to make doubly sure.



    If you are worried about compensation, then I'd recommend not running the wizard or installing any beta software on your system.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Richard,



    I'm glad it went better! Thanks a bunch for running your project through it and giving us this feedback. If you can send me mail directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) we can help investigate the Namespace issue you mentioned above.



    Thanks again,



    Scott

  • Hi,



    I was really happy to find this update, it works much better than beta 2!!! From 1 day of work to 15 minutes of work on a pretty complex web project.



    The issues that I hade to manually correct was:



    #1 Controls declared as protected/public for a reason (because they were accessed from another class) caused compile errors.



    #2 If you declare multiple controls on the same line in codebehind the wizard leaves the last control on the line for some reason, looks like a bug. Had to manually remove these rows on about 20-30 places.



    I will try out this wizard on another large project also, I'll let you now if I find any other issues on that one..



    Good work!

  • Scott,



    My company is starting a conversion from VS 2003 to VS 2005 with and ASP.NET project.



    Just for clarity purposes, the build you have list is 50215.45 but the beta 2 build I have is 50215.44, which I believe is the most recent.



    Did I miss a build along the way?



    Thanks,

    Rob

  • Hi Rob,



    It should work fine with that build too -- it is the same VS and ASP.NET binaries (we just rev'd it once for a setup change which is why the numbers are different).



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • Scott,



    I should have some solid feedback tomorrow witht the new wizard. Our preliminary tests show some problems, like the OnInit() and some other oddities.



    Would you rather have feedback at the webwish email in this post?



    -Rob

  • Hi Rob,



    It would be great if you could send the feedback to the webwish email address. We know of a number of issues the wizard doesn't handle that we've fixed in the last few weeks based on earlier feedback -- so it would be great to validate if you are finding new things.



    Thanks!



    - Scott

Comments have been disabled for this content.