What is best way to convert desktop app to web app?
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I work alone, and I have developed a huge desktop app, probably a quarter million lines of code, that has evolved for well over 10 years. I keep thinking it would be nice to convert it to a browser UI, but have watched many technologies go by, like asp, ajax, and now there's webmatrix, and sometimes I wonder whether I should take the leap, or whether it may cost me another 10 years to rewrite it for the web. It uses .NET remoting, and is multithreaded, so wcf and parallel programming come to mind as well. Fear promotes a lack of action, but knowledge defeats fear, so I thought I'd submit this general question to the "big team" out there in the code project universe. :)
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When the app is well-structured into several layers (UI/presentation, business logic, data access), you could reuse most layers unmodified, and simply modify/add another presentation layer. If it isn't well-structured yet, now is the time to spend the effort. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
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modified on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:18 AM
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I'm a winforms person by preference and have avoided working with the web, thankfully. However we have just made the decision to move to web delivered UI for all new development. To reverse a 10yo, still evolving app, thats going to be tough for a 1 man show. A lot would depend on your customers, do you work in a company or do you sell the app as a commercial product? Who is going to foot the bill? Mind you a total rebuild improves any application. I know any app I built 10 years ago would benifit from it.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Thanks for your thoughts. I guess a core of basic necessary functions would have to go together on a web UI, and leave less-used functionality as a desktop app. They could use RDC to go in and change some of that. (It's a commercial product.)
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BobishKindaGuy wrote:
probably a quarter million lines of code, that has evolved for well over 10 year
Converting this to a browser based application is not going to be easy. It could take ages..... There are a few plugins [^] that display winforms within browsers and you could consider them.
The funniest thing about this particular signature is that by the time you realise it doesn't say anything it's too late to stop reading it. My latest tip/trick - Silverlight *.XCP files
Thanks Abhinav. The plugins reference you cited has a posted date of 2003, so I only spent a moment looking at it, since so many current ideas are very different from what was available at that time.
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modified on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 1:43 PM
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I'd say that the best way would be to avoid rewriting the entire application. I imagine that your application consists of multiple, smaller modules that interact? How about adding functionality that allows interaction over the web, without ditching the desktop-application? What starts with writing a webpage to retrieve/modify configuration-settings could very well grow into a separate interface over time :)
I are Troll :suss:
Right, continue the evolution. Any ideas what may be the best technologies to use? This WebMatrix looks promising.
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When the app is well-structured into several layers (UI/presentation, business logic, data access), you could reuse most layers unmodified, and simply modify/add another presentation layer. If it isn't well-structured yet, now is the time to spend the effort. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.
modified on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:18 AM
Perfect answer :thumbsup:
Dave
If this helped, please vote & accept answer!
Binging is like googling, it just feels dirtier. Please take your VB.NET out of our nice case sensitive forum.(Pete O'Hanlon)
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn) -
Right, continue the evolution. Any ideas what may be the best technologies to use? This WebMatrix looks promising.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
Where are you storing your data in the desktop-application? If you already have Sql Server, you'd only need a webserver that's capable of running ASP.NET. I'd go this classic route, but only because I'm familiar with it. I haven't tried the WebMatrix package (yet), but does look like a good place to start. It contains a webserver, and Sql Compact. That setup might not support stored procedures, and other Sql Compact limitations would apply.
I are Troll :suss:
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When the app is well-structured into several layers (UI/presentation, business logic, data access), you could reuse most layers unmodified, and simply modify/add another presentation layer. If it isn't well-structured yet, now is the time to spend the effort. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.
modified on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:18 AM
Thanks for your comments, Luc. Yes, I actually had browser UI in the back of my mind from the very start, but laziness and incompatible coding practices have probably produced a wrinkly outcome. Every time we open a quote, for example, we should have the discipline to put the string in some sort of a localization module, but our mind is on the logic required to solve the problem. So let's say I decided to implement your idea. I still wonder what framework would be "sufficient" to go forward with. WebMatrix? Even a year ago, there were tutorials surrounding Silverlight that have now been superceded by concepts available directly in VS2010. E.g. xaml coding is reduced now. Maybe waiting one more year would allow all these ideas to mature and be "stable" enough to adopt. I hesitate to invest hundreds of hours into something that will prove to be defunct in a few months. One MS rep told me a little over a year ago that LINQ was not too great for many-to-many type of data relationships, and my app has quite a bit of that.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Thanks for your comments, Luc. Yes, I actually had browser UI in the back of my mind from the very start, but laziness and incompatible coding practices have probably produced a wrinkly outcome. Every time we open a quote, for example, we should have the discipline to put the string in some sort of a localization module, but our mind is on the logic required to solve the problem. So let's say I decided to implement your idea. I still wonder what framework would be "sufficient" to go forward with. WebMatrix? Even a year ago, there were tutorials surrounding Silverlight that have now been superceded by concepts available directly in VS2010. E.g. xaml coding is reduced now. Maybe waiting one more year would allow all these ideas to mature and be "stable" enough to adopt. I hesitate to invest hundreds of hours into something that will prove to be defunct in a few months. One MS rep told me a little over a year ago that LINQ was not too great for many-to-many type of data relationships, and my app has quite a bit of that.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
If you don't want to choose some technology that may fade away in a matter of months or years, why not use something that has been around somewhat longer already? Start by looking at ASP.NET plain and simple. Once you have restructured your app, that is. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.
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Perfect answer :thumbsup:
Dave
If this helped, please vote & accept answer!
Binging is like googling, it just feels dirtier. Please take your VB.NET out of our nice case sensitive forum.(Pete O'Hanlon)
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn)Thanks, Dave. Your signature line urges folks to accept an answer. I do want to acknowledge any contribution, but here's a question: Do you feel that "accepting" too quickly might cause some people who may have a valuable contribution to ignore the topic since it appears to have been "dealt with"? (My question stems from not being aware of how people tend to judge whether to visit topics when trolling CodeProject.)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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If you don't want to choose some technology that may fade away in a matter of months or years, why not use something that has been around somewhat longer already? Start by looking at ASP.NET plain and simple. Once you have restructured your app, that is. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.
Luc Pattyn wrote:
why not use something that has been around somewhat longer already?
I haven't been following all the discussions, webinars, training etc, but my impression is that newer technologies eliminate a lot of plumbing type of code that I would prefer not to have to teach myself. E.g. when ajax first came out. Also, I want whatever I do to look way cool, so I'm afraid that if I go with the older stuff, it might look like some windows 3.1 thing. To compensate for that, I've considered 3rd party tools like the really nice devexpress controls, etc. I haven't gone there either, here's my reason: If my app were in-house, rather than commercially marketed (my "team of one" includes wearing the marketing hat as well), it would probably be okay. But I avoid 3rd party dlls as much as possible, so my version updates are not driven by 3rd party compatibility issues/bugs. I really appreciate all the feedback I'm getting! When you work alone, you need other voices and someone to bounce ideas off. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Thanks, Dave. Your signature line urges folks to accept an answer. I do want to acknowledge any contribution, but here's a question: Do you feel that "accepting" too quickly might cause some people who may have a valuable contribution to ignore the topic since it appears to have been "dealt with"? (My question stems from not being aware of how people tend to judge whether to visit topics when trolling CodeProject.)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
In quick answers quite possibly, but not in the forums (IMO).
Dave
If this helped, please vote & accept answer!
Binging is like googling, it just feels dirtier. Please take your VB.NET out of our nice case sensitive forum.(Pete O'Hanlon)
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn) -
Where are you storing your data in the desktop-application? If you already have Sql Server, you'd only need a webserver that's capable of running ASP.NET. I'd go this classic route, but only because I'm familiar with it. I haven't tried the WebMatrix package (yet), but does look like a good place to start. It contains a webserver, and Sql Compact. That setup might not support stored procedures, and other Sql Compact limitations would apply.
I are Troll :suss:
Thanks again Eddy! The back end is sql server, mostly express, and has some stored procs. The whole webserver thing is a big black hole to me, which is part of why I posted the question. I haven't been following all the best practices, etc. But one big concern is that I want my customers to be able to use it with whatever system they currently have. E.g. if they're not running IIS, I don't my app to be eliminated on that basis. I see what you mean about WebMatrix. It may not be suitable. But I get the impression we may see more of this kind of "grouping" of products to hopefully "simplify" the whole issue of "making your windows desktop app work on the web". I think from the answers I have received so far, we are not "there" yet. :sigh:
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Thanks again Eddy! The back end is sql server, mostly express, and has some stored procs. The whole webserver thing is a big black hole to me, which is part of why I posted the question. I haven't been following all the best practices, etc. But one big concern is that I want my customers to be able to use it with whatever system they currently have. E.g. if they're not running IIS, I don't my app to be eliminated on that basis. I see what you mean about WebMatrix. It may not be suitable. But I get the impression we may see more of this kind of "grouping" of products to hopefully "simplify" the whole issue of "making your windows desktop app work on the web". I think from the answers I have received so far, we are not "there" yet. :sigh:
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I haven't been following all the best practices, etc.
That means that you're talking about a business-application, not something that specifically designed to be used in a text-book for a cs-class. Code grows, and usually the amount of best-practices used therin do so to.
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
But one big concern is that I want my customers to be able to use it with whatever system they currently have. E.g. if they're not running IIS, I don't my app to be eliminated on that basis.
Good point. I'm running an Apache webserver, with Mono. Serves ASP.NET code quite nicely, at no cost. A nice extra is that you can brag on being compatible with Linux :)
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
But I get the impression we may see more of this kind of "grouping" of products to hopefully "simplify" the whole issue of "making your windows desktop app work on the web".
Ever heard people complain on the price of Office? A grouping of products is often perceived as a single product that happens to consist of different parts. I'm looking forward to meet a decent follow-up for Microsoft Access. WebMatrix sounds like it may come close to that :thumbsup:
I are Troll :suss:
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I work alone, and I have developed a huge desktop app, probably a quarter million lines of code, that has evolved for well over 10 years. I keep thinking it would be nice to convert it to a browser UI, but have watched many technologies go by, like asp, ajax, and now there's webmatrix, and sometimes I wonder whether I should take the leap, or whether it may cost me another 10 years to rewrite it for the web. It uses .NET remoting, and is multithreaded, so wcf and parallel programming come to mind as well. Fear promotes a lack of action, but knowledge defeats fear, so I thought I'd submit this general question to the "big team" out there in the code project universe. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
MY first question is why? Does it really need to be a web bassed app? What value do the users gain, or are you just looking for something cool to try :) The only reason I bring it up is because it could be a SIGNIFICANT effort. You might get more value by simply migrating parts of the application engine over to Dotnet instead.
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MY first question is why? Does it really need to be a web bassed app? What value do the users gain, or are you just looking for something cool to try :) The only reason I bring it up is because it could be a SIGNIFICANT effort. You might get more value by simply migrating parts of the application engine over to Dotnet instead.
Thanks, Ray, good question. 1. Many of the orgs that buy my product are (or pretending they are) moving towards standardizing on browser apps only. 2. The system is already client/server, and client and server communicate information with each other in real time using .NET Remoting. If all the processing were done on the server side, I think the remoting could be done away with, which would be a generally good thing since tcp packets flying around are sometimes interfered with by firewalls, etc. 3. Users could use the client from home instead of exclusively on their workstations (without RDC or TeamViewer etc).
Ray Cassick wrote:
You might get more value by simply migrating parts of the application engine over to Dotnet instead.
This second point is what other friends have been posting. I think I could work towards this goal by moving more of the functionality to the server component, although when I think of just what functionality could move, I'm left with significant business rules etc that I enforce right in the windows form. I guess even that could migrate... I would still have a windows form app, though, but one benefit there would be a skinnier app, and of course, it would force me to get closer to the browser concept. Just thinking out loud, my UI is somewhat rich- glow buttons, enhanced datagrid allowing column selection, custom columns, export to excel. If I were starting over, no doubt most of what I have just mentioned would end up on the server side. I still come back to - use what? Silverlight/VS2010/.NET4/? Does Silverlight do what ajax does, slightly more real time interactivity without a page refresh? Should I start using expression studio to design my UI, or does VS 2010 have everything a windows form guy needs without resorting to using more than one environment? I'd go to school again, but need food so I can program. :) Thanks again for your time in considering my situation, I really appreciate it. Bob
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Thanks, Ray, good question. 1. Many of the orgs that buy my product are (or pretending they are) moving towards standardizing on browser apps only. 2. The system is already client/server, and client and server communicate information with each other in real time using .NET Remoting. If all the processing were done on the server side, I think the remoting could be done away with, which would be a generally good thing since tcp packets flying around are sometimes interfered with by firewalls, etc. 3. Users could use the client from home instead of exclusively on their workstations (without RDC or TeamViewer etc).
Ray Cassick wrote:
You might get more value by simply migrating parts of the application engine over to Dotnet instead.
This second point is what other friends have been posting. I think I could work towards this goal by moving more of the functionality to the server component, although when I think of just what functionality could move, I'm left with significant business rules etc that I enforce right in the windows form. I guess even that could migrate... I would still have a windows form app, though, but one benefit there would be a skinnier app, and of course, it would force me to get closer to the browser concept. Just thinking out loud, my UI is somewhat rich- glow buttons, enhanced datagrid allowing column selection, custom columns, export to excel. If I were starting over, no doubt most of what I have just mentioned would end up on the server side. I still come back to - use what? Silverlight/VS2010/.NET4/? Does Silverlight do what ajax does, slightly more real time interactivity without a page refresh? Should I start using expression studio to design my UI, or does VS 2010 have everything a windows form guy needs without resorting to using more than one environment? I'd go to school again, but need food so I can program. :) Thanks again for your time in considering my situation, I really appreciate it. Bob
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
We are moving to a web UI ONLY because Silverlight seems to offer a much richer user experience (I hate that expression) than classic ASP. The learning curve from winforms to SL is HUGE, xaml is a completely different paradigm to what we are used to. As a first step I would look to replacing your remoting interface with a WCF service. This would allow you to plug any UI onto the service. Shiny UI and extended functionality are going to be difficult for some time while we get a handle on xaml. We are ignoring Expression Blend until we have the functionality under control.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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We are moving to a web UI ONLY because Silverlight seems to offer a much richer user experience (I hate that expression) than classic ASP. The learning curve from winforms to SL is HUGE, xaml is a completely different paradigm to what we are used to. As a first step I would look to replacing your remoting interface with a WCF service. This would allow you to plug any UI onto the service. Shiny UI and extended functionality are going to be difficult for some time while we get a handle on xaml. We are ignoring Expression Blend until we have the functionality under control.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Thanks, Mycroft Holmes, for the insightful reply. Food for thought, taking things in a measured way instead of jumping in. Speaking of what we tend to hate, as you mentioned about the expression "a richer user experience" - I spent a couple of years, untold hours, trying to get my head around remoting. Then this WCF appears, and do you think I can find an article that tells me in plain english how to move from remoting to WCF? Arrgh. Also, I don't want to write xaml. I want the mongoose to kill the snakes for me... (Donovan) Anyway, Bill Burrows, at the MyVBProf site, has some nice tutorials about silverlight, RIA, even MVVM. He demos some redeeming improvements in VS2010 that seem to require a lot less xaml programming. I am using such things to keep my finger in the pie while I figure out what to do with my app. Thanks again.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Thanks, Mycroft Holmes, for the insightful reply. Food for thought, taking things in a measured way instead of jumping in. Speaking of what we tend to hate, as you mentioned about the expression "a richer user experience" - I spent a couple of years, untold hours, trying to get my head around remoting. Then this WCF appears, and do you think I can find an article that tells me in plain english how to move from remoting to WCF? Arrgh. Also, I don't want to write xaml. I want the mongoose to kill the snakes for me... (Donovan) Anyway, Bill Burrows, at the MyVBProf site, has some nice tutorials about silverlight, RIA, even MVVM. He demos some redeeming improvements in VS2010 that seem to require a lot less xaml programming. I am using such things to keep my finger in the pie while I figure out what to do with my app. Thanks again.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
If you don't like the xaml then forget RIA, seems to want to move everything into the xaml. Also the latest MS demos seem to lean almost exclusively to EF as the DAL, I find that distressing and chucked the entire RIA concept out. We are just about finished our MVVM code generator so we should be getting a bit more production. My first .net book was on Dotnet Remoting, trying to learn dot net and remoting from scratch, what a nightmare. Eventually someone slapped me and pointed me to an ordinary winforms app and I never looked back.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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I work alone, and I have developed a huge desktop app, probably a quarter million lines of code, that has evolved for well over 10 years. I keep thinking it would be nice to convert it to a browser UI, but have watched many technologies go by, like asp, ajax, and now there's webmatrix, and sometimes I wonder whether I should take the leap, or whether it may cost me another 10 years to rewrite it for the web. It uses .NET remoting, and is multithreaded, so wcf and parallel programming come to mind as well. Fear promotes a lack of action, but knowledge defeats fear, so I thought I'd submit this general question to the "big team" out there in the code project universe. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
Why not just make it a Click Once "Smart Client"? Then you can keep it a windows application, but deploy it from the web like a Java Applet. You'll probably need very little code changes, it's more of a deployment option really and simple to implement. Unless you have a customer willing to finance the effort, it's probably not worth the massive amount of coding you'll need to do. You can do smart client in a day. The beauty of Smart Client apps is that you have a single install location (on the web server) to keep up to date. When the user clicks the icon, it automatically goes out to check for a new version and downloads it before starting up the app. It's really best of both worlds...
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I work alone, and I have developed a huge desktop app, probably a quarter million lines of code, that has evolved for well over 10 years. I keep thinking it would be nice to convert it to a browser UI, but have watched many technologies go by, like asp, ajax, and now there's webmatrix, and sometimes I wonder whether I should take the leap, or whether it may cost me another 10 years to rewrite it for the web. It uses .NET remoting, and is multithreaded, so wcf and parallel programming come to mind as well. Fear promotes a lack of action, but knowledge defeats fear, so I thought I'd submit this general question to the "big team" out there in the code project universe. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
Take a look at visualwebgui. There's a screencast transforming a winformsapplication to a webapplication with their softwarestack. :omg: