Extreme ASP.NET Makeover – Getting Your House in Order

Posted by James Kovacs on 2009/05/11

Sand Zen Garden A few months back, I announced that I was doing a series of articles for MSDN Magazine on improving a “classic” ASP.NET application with modern tooling and frameworks. As an application, I chose ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0 to use as my example throughout. The first article, Extreme ASP.NET Makeover – Getting Your House in Order, went live a few days ago. The article is purposefully a different format for MSDN Magazine than “traditional” articles in that it incorporates short screencasts where appropriate rather than just code snippets and pictures. (Code snippets and pictures are included too, though!) I tried to make the screencasts an integral part of the narrative where actually showing something was easier than text, pictures, or code. I would love to hear your feedback on the format and content.

Nitpickers Corner: In the series, I use MSBuild as the build tool. Yes, I wrote my own PowerShell-based build tool, psake. Yes, I use NAnt on many of my projects for clients. (They’re already using NAnt and PowerShell is a new skillset for them.) So why MSBuild for the series? Because it is installed by default with .NET 2.0 and above. Not my first choice, but a pragmatic choice for a series focused on improving what you have.

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  • http://martinsantics.blogspot.com/ Martin Evans

    Hi James,
    I’ve just read your opening article and have found it really interesting. I think “Brown-field” developments are more widely undertaken than people think.
    I’ll be following this series with some interest and would welcome your thoughts on the comparison between Nant and MS-Build at some point.

  • Mark Pawelek

    Tools using xml programming languages are daft.

    (N)Ant, Cruise-Control, xslt, MS-build – the designers of those tools should committed to the mad-house where they belong … or, even better, should be forced to read a book on user interface design.

    I think this PSake tool sounds like a great idea. I shall be using it forthwith.

  • http://codebetter.com/members/james.kovacs/default.aspx james.kovacs

    @Mark – Yes, I would agree. Programming in XML is generally awful. I would have preferred to to use psake for the article, but it wasn’t possible for non-technical reasons.