Recently, the GrandView Team came to the end of a long and storied journey--we retired the final few ASP pages from our application. When I first started working full-time at Rovisys in 2002, GrandView was an application fully entrenched in Classic ASP. We had an n-tier architecture with VBScript accessing VB6 COM objects which in turn queried a SQL Server database. It was a decent architecture (and best practice at the time), but it was plagued with IIS resets, DLL-hell, and frequent strange errors.
In college, I had done a lot of research into Microsoft's brand new .NET platform and its promise of more rapid development, better security, and more powerful applications. I brought that knowledge to Rovisys, and with my encouragement, we began to implement a few key pages in ASP.NET. The beauty of a web application is that, unlike a desktop application like Microsoft Word, each page is like a miniature application and can be upgraded to new technology independently. There were some caveats with this approach, but we managed to make it work. And so, for six years we developed all new pages on ASP.NET, converted older ASP pages when we had the time, and continued to maintain both technologies.
After all of the pain and heartache it had caused us over the years, it was without the slightest regret when we finally converted our last page from ASP to ASP.NET. And because of our methodical testing and deployment policies, from the perspective of our users Classic ASP left GrandView with a whimper instead of a bang.
I remember those first few months of developing in .NET and knowing that this platform was going to be something special. Years later, Microsoft's investment in .NET continues to grow and its use is pervasive throughout Rovisys. Its promises were, for the most part, fulfilled in that GrandView runs with much less intervention than ever before. And that means a more reliable project management system for you.
Bryan DeBois
GrandView Business Solutions Senior Developer