ASP Upgrade Companion

The ASP Upgrade Companion is an automated migration tool used to upgrade ASP files (*.asp) to ASP.NET (*.aspx). This process is done employing most of the main features used to upgrade from VB6 to VB.NET and C#, such as the typing engine, the data access mappings to ADO.NET, some mappings for XML libraries and more.

However, the source and target technologies are way too different; for example, ASP source code contains HTML and VBS (Visual Basic Script) code and this code mixture was interpreted while ASP.NET supports C# and VB.NET in the server code and all the websites and publications are compiled into libraries in *.dll files.

The ASP Upgrade Companion is a plug-in for the VBUC that must be purchased separately.

Mappings for ASP Type Library

The ASPUC upgrades the ASP native objects, and server/client specific functions to their respective ASP.NET equivalents.

The ASP Upgrade Companion successfully converts the following objects and constructions:

• Cookies
• Response/Request
• Form
• QueryString
• Session
• ServerVariables
• Application
• VBA library members

Mappings for VBScript

VBS (Visual Basic Script) is a subset of utility functions from the VB6 language but there are some constructions and details that may differ from VB6. The ASP Upgrade Companion is able to consider all the VBS details and particularities and successfully generate the C# or VB.NET equivalent code to be used in the *.ASPX files.

“Include” files support

The “include” clause works as a macro during the code interpretation; when the “include” keyword is found, all the code contained in the included file will be sequentially interpreted like if it was copied into the caller’s body. The ASPUC identifies and resolves all the “include” clauses, applies this macro-like pattern to all the ASP code and its multiple levels, resolves all the conflicts like multiple definitions of the same structure or method, and then translates the whole ASP solution with all the information gathered from the previous stages, and finally generates all the translated files keeping the original “files and folders” structure of the original project.

Declaration handling

In ASP technology, the programmer can have declarations and code all mixed up, but in ASP.NET the declarations have to be separated from the rest of the code into a declaration script. The ASPUC extracts all the declaration from the original source code during the translation to generate an ASPX file that complies with this language restriction.

ASP to ASPX references

All the references done in the source code to other ASP files needs to be refactored to the new *.ASPX file names, the ASP Upgrade Companion makes sure every reference to a *.ASP file will be re written to the newly generated file name.

Scalability and maintainability

The migrated solution is completely compatible with Visual Studio IDE, resulting in an easier maintenance/development process.