Migrate legacy ASP.NET Webforms application (specially aspx controls and its code behind pages) to .NET Core 6 using DotVVM

Question

Hi,

One of our client requirement is to migrate legacy ASP.NET Webforms application (specially aspx controls and its code behind pages) to .NET Core 6.
We were evaluating different tools and then we found that DotVVM (https://www.dotvvm.com/) which claims that it has support and can migrate all the ASP.NET webforms controls to .NET 6.
DotVVM is a free and open-source framework for ASP.NET. It lets you create web apps using the MVVM pattern, with just C# and HTML. It is an alternative to ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC.

Hence, in this process we want to know whether DotVVM is compatible with .NET 6 and whether it has full support for all the webforms controls so that we can cover the same for complex pages and controls and the same can be converted. The intention is that if we use Dotvvm wrapper component then it should have full support in migrating the same to .NET 6.

Hence , kindly let me know whether dotvvm controls are compatible to .NET core 6 so that we can propose the same to the client.
Furthermore, whether support for ascx (user controls) or Ajax controls are present so that these UI controls can also be migrated and supported in .NET 6.

Moreover, any suggestion is also welcome from your side by using any other tools etc. which can do the migration.
Our primary intention is to migrate ASP.NET webforms controls and its code behind pages to Razor pages so that the same can be supported in .NET 6
Hence, any tool if you can recommend which can do most of this conversion will be really appreciable.

Appreciate your quick response on the same.

Regards,
Debobrata

Answer 1

This forum is for MS products. Your question really seems to be about using a third party product DotVVM. You should really post your questions to them in their help forum. They seem to provide support from Github and Stack Overflow.

Answer 2

You clearly did not read the documentation.

I did a quick look. It allows you to build a client side MVVM application using knockout.js as the binding library. It also uses server code to generate the page template, and the site can be build with .net only (common pages can be build without user generated javascript)

they have a different template engine than webforms, and different controls. they have mostly a one of one control to the webforms controls. By definition their controls are Ajax enabled via knockout.js. you would build composite controls rather than an ascx.

binding is different than webforms. in webforms, the server builds a control tree. at render the tree is userid to create html. on post back data is bound to the control tree.

DotVVM uses the more traditional view model, and uses knockoff.js binding and html generation, that is the full render is done client side, rather than server side.

Their migration approach is to add DotVVM support to your old webform project and start converting. Once the site is fully converted, you can migrate to their .net core platform.

Microsofts migration path for webforms is:

1) migrate to MVC on 4.8 platform, then migrate to asp.net core.
2) convert all webforms to razor pages on asp.net core
3) convert all webforms to blazor pages on asp.net core
4) convert webforms to javascript framework and call asp.net core webapi

your migration will depend on how well you abstracted you architecture. Is it multi-tier and you only need to migrate the UI. Is it C# or VB.net? asp.net core really only supports C# (library projects can be vb.net)

Answer 3

Hi @Debobrata Bose ,

Hence, in this process we want to know whether DotVVM is compatible with .NET 6 and whether it has full support for all the webforms controls so that we can cover the same for complex pages and controls and the same can be converted.

DotVVM is currently not supported in the Q&A forums, the supported products are listed over here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/dotvvm.

Moreover, any suggestion is also welcome from your side by using any other tools etc. which can do the migration.

As far as I known, there seems no such official tool to dynamic migrate Webforms to .NET Core. You can refer to this answer to learn how to migrate.

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Best Regards,
Rena