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. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
Have a look at the MVVM pattern that is in common use in WPF coding. It's basic selling point is that it completely separates the UI from the business logic. You could re-code separate pieces of the app over time, with no change on the UI. This would allow your users to act as a last line of defense against UI-breakage ("Hey, after the last update, XYZ broke"). Then, when you're finished with this separation, your Web UI will be a mechanical process of coding UI's for each piece. You said that the app is multithreaded. Does that imply that it is computationally intensive? All business logic will be centralized so your server will have to be beefy enough to deal with it.
Before .NET 4.0, object Universe = NULL;
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Thin client apps are so much easier to administer. 1) Changes to the app don't have to be rolled out to 100's of possible users by installing something on their computer. Then when 98% of them are updated and you start getting calls from people who don't read email or don't click yes to update their software when prompted you start pulling your hair out. 2) No installation involved so it involves less helpdesk time. 3) Less worry that someone may leave your company with proprietary software on their laptop. 4) The ability to log in any where any time from any computer. 5) Less of a requirement for users to have high end computers because the load is transferred to a server or a cluster that is centrally managed. 6) the list goes on... I speak from experience having to currently support and develop desktop and web applications. If given the choice, 100% of the time I would prefer to make a web application from a support standpoint. The only time I would consider a desktop application is if it were something that was not used by many people, was calculation intensive and there were no spare servers available for it.
Well put, MatrixDud ! Now if only what you said had been part of a course in high school, my app would have been in the cloud long ago! But I went down another road and now, I've got this huge pile of (cool) code to push around into other smaller piles, I guess. :-D Thanks for taking the time to share your very relevant perspective to this discussion! Bob
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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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.
You have already received lot of nice replies. I hope mine too adds something. BTW I am a windows forms fan so I would avoid doing this. 1. Your application must be divided in to layers I suppose. So reuse existing code after refactoring. 2. Do not try and achieve similar experience in UI as in windows application. It will be tough to give similar experience. 3. If it is related to some business process, have a look into work flow as well. 4. Do not forget to rewrite what deserves to be rewritten. 5. You can use use WCF but do not think of replacing remoting with that, try and make it SOA compliant for in future, you do not need to worry much.
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BobishKindaGuy wrote:
But the shine must come before you show it to the world, at least in some environments, wouldn't you agree?
I'll agree that there are environments that judge a car by it's paintjob :) Good wine needs no bush.
I are Troll :suss:
Yeah, I hear ya! But a few years ago, I was in the market for a car, and I did hesitate to buy the Lada. Could have been a good car, it even shipped with a toolkit so you could fix it yourself. But something about it didn't inspire confidence. Philosophizing here: What we really need is a "car", instead of all these throwaway junk boxes. Capitalism! Competition! It's creating huge scrap heaps! Whereas "cooperation" would produce a nice solid, reliable, simpler, and durable product, like say a stainless-steel car. I think it's similar here. What we need is a reliable product, not a glitzy one. But some of the grace built into a product to make it look cool also can end up making it seem more intuitive to the user. I've always put a lot of thought into the UI. Maybe too much, and I'm sure your comment is meant to help us balance the two concerns. I am listening!!
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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MachineGun wrote:
Why not just make it a Click Once "Smart Client"?
Hmmm! Do you have an article in mind that might help me analyze this option? Or would it be sufficient to wade through help do you think?
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
This is a good overview of what a Smart Client is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998468.aspx[^] This is a starter how-to: Click Once Deployment Technique[^] This article is missing one huge step though - Signing your app with a certificate and running the MAGE.EXE command on the deployment server. It'll work in VS, but then when you move it to a real web server, you have to include the certificate file and then run the MAGE commands to "certify" it on that machine. For instance; Say your application is called "BobsApplication" You would copy up the deployment files that VS outputs AND the certificate file (.pfx) that you need to generate under the "signing" tab. (in the Project->Properties->Signing tab), and the MAGE.EXE program up to your web server. You can put the cert. file and mage.exe in the same folder as your application. Then run the following MAGE commands at the DOS command line: mage.exe -Update BobsApplication.application -pu http://YourServerName/BobsApp/BobsApplication.application mage.exe -sign BobsApplication.application -cf BobsApplication_TemporaryKey.pfx ** Where BobsApplication_TemporaryKey.pfx is the certificate file that you generated under the Project->Properties->Signing tab. I also assumed you created an aliased folder in IIS call BobsApp in the first mage command. MAGE.EXE comes with Visual Studio, you can find it in the SDK folder (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin) Then, to Run your application, you would go to the browser and type: http://YourServerName/BobsApp/BobsApplication.application I would also search Google for something like: "Building your first ClickOnce application" or "Building your first SmartClient application" Hope that helps!
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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:
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
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
YES! Thanks for that. I didn't know about that. One more piece of the puzzle is in place.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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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.
I don't know much about your application nor will i read all those replies to see if my answer is already said, but my answer would be a simple solution to work in between, you will have to write no code at all nor using any plugins to convert your solution, all you have to do is getting a server "PC with windows server will be enough" and a static IP and a webgate certificate from microsoft then implement the TS service and webgate "Terminal services" then people can run your application from your website as a winform application on remote desktop, I tried this option with many of my applications and it worked like charm
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A well developed .NET desktop app should be easily ported to ASP.NET. You do however want to analyze the server requirements and the load that it may encounter. If it's a calculation intensive application (ie: Scientific, 3D graphics, etc) then it may be better as a desktop app.
MatrixDud wrote:
A well developed .NET desktop app should be easily ported to ASP.NET
I'd love to get some more comments on this. With SL, WebMatrix, Ajax, and a whole confusing array of other stuff that is all "newer" than ASP.NET, I hesitate to jump into an ASP.NET project unless it is really the best way to go. For example, has MS produced good-looking controls for ASP.NET? If ASP.NET "had it all", why did the world need Silverlight? (The comment about calculation-intensive is not a concern for my app, though. It's more about interactivity between server and client. E.g. The user clicks a button on the UI and this causes the server app to control a piece of equipment interactively.)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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This is a good overview of what a Smart Client is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998468.aspx[^] This is a starter how-to: Click Once Deployment Technique[^] This article is missing one huge step though - Signing your app with a certificate and running the MAGE.EXE command on the deployment server. It'll work in VS, but then when you move it to a real web server, you have to include the certificate file and then run the MAGE commands to "certify" it on that machine. For instance; Say your application is called "BobsApplication" You would copy up the deployment files that VS outputs AND the certificate file (.pfx) that you need to generate under the "signing" tab. (in the Project->Properties->Signing tab), and the MAGE.EXE program up to your web server. You can put the cert. file and mage.exe in the same folder as your application. Then run the following MAGE commands at the DOS command line: mage.exe -Update BobsApplication.application -pu http://YourServerName/BobsApp/BobsApplication.application mage.exe -sign BobsApplication.application -cf BobsApplication_TemporaryKey.pfx ** Where BobsApplication_TemporaryKey.pfx is the certificate file that you generated under the Project->Properties->Signing tab. I also assumed you created an aliased folder in IIS call BobsApp in the first mage command. MAGE.EXE comes with Visual Studio, you can find it in the SDK folder (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin) Then, to Run your application, you would go to the browser and type: http://YourServerName/BobsApp/BobsApplication.application I would also search Google for something like: "Building your first ClickOnce application" or "Building your first SmartClient application" Hope that helps!
Wow, thanks MachineGun, for going to all that effort - excellent reply! I recently implemented an auto-update feature in my app, based on this article: Application Auto Update Revisited[^] The main app checks, downloads the update, and if that all goes well, launches another app. All the second app does is replace the main app's executable, and then launch the main app. It seems to be working. I used that because I read some negative stuff about ClickOnce, I forget where. But I wonder whether you have a comment on whether the procedure you have outlined in your message has some advantages in your opinion. Thanks again for the reply! I will analyze it! I noticed there was some command line stuff to do. I guess the VS installer project could implement that somehow. This is a commercial app, where I would prefer that the installer does everything so the IT folks don't need to do any tweaking. But that is only from a quick perusal of your post. As I say, I will take the time to read the references you included. Bob
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Take a look at visualwebgui. There's a screencast transforming a winformsapplication to a webapplication with their softwarestack. :omg:
Thanks Ralph.Popp! I went right away to the site and visualwebgui does look quite painless. The price is right too. Now this discussion was started to discuss strategies for making my app be a browser app, so please don't be annoyed if I include some philosophy here - Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll bet their product requires me installing their dlls on my customer's server. Just so you see the workings of my tiny cynical mind: Since the visualwebgui folks are on version 6.4, that means they had versions previous to that, and in all likelihood, will also have versions 6.5, 7.1, and so on. My concern is that if I don't have the source code, I become dependent on other developers outside my "team of one" when there are problems with compatibility. Then my customer is mad at me, and then I have to get mad at the visualwebgui people, and of course then the problem escalates, and I end up sneaking around at night in my black ninja outfit, getting revenge by letting the air out of their tires. Ha ha. But seriously, I really try to do it all myself if possible. That philosphy has served me well, although at the cost of my time, a lot of it, which I realize could be saved through using a more "convenient" 3rd party app. In fact the same goes for those devexpress free controls. I can't use them, cool as they are, because I have no control over the source code. Let me know your thought on this, if you see a gap in my reasoning, and thanks again for your reply.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Bindows! Interesting! Thanks, squeek, I will study that.
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I don't know much about your application nor will i read all those replies to see if my answer is already said, but my answer would be a simple solution to work in between, you will have to write no code at all nor using any plugins to convert your solution, all you have to do is getting a server "PC with windows server will be enough" and a static IP and a webgate certificate from microsoft then implement the TS service and webgate "Terminal services" then people can run your application from your website as a winform application on remote desktop, I tried this option with many of my applications and it worked like charm
Thanks very much, nazmolla, Sounds interesting! I have customers who have a workstation at work, and may also want to work from home. How do you see this implementation working for them?
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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You have already received lot of nice replies. I hope mine too adds something. BTW I am a windows forms fan so I would avoid doing this. 1. Your application must be divided in to layers I suppose. So reuse existing code after refactoring. 2. Do not try and achieve similar experience in UI as in windows application. It will be tough to give similar experience. 3. If it is related to some business process, have a look into work flow as well. 4. Do not forget to rewrite what deserves to be rewritten. 5. You can use use WCF but do not think of replacing remoting with that, try and make it SOA compliant for in future, you do not need to worry much.
Thanks very much d@nish!
d@nish wrote:
You can use use WCF but do not think of replacing remoting with that
It sounds like you have had a problem that leads you to this conclusion, am I right? My app is heavily using remoting. I was under the impression that WCF was supposed to do everything remoting does. Also, could you please expand the acronym, SOA, I'm not familiar with that. When you mention "work flow", I assume you mean using visio or similar. Again, thanks for taking the time to provide such a thorough reply.
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Yeah, I hear ya! But a few years ago, I was in the market for a car, and I did hesitate to buy the Lada. Could have been a good car, it even shipped with a toolkit so you could fix it yourself. But something about it didn't inspire confidence. Philosophizing here: What we really need is a "car", instead of all these throwaway junk boxes. Capitalism! Competition! It's creating huge scrap heaps! Whereas "cooperation" would produce a nice solid, reliable, simpler, and durable product, like say a stainless-steel car. I think it's similar here. What we need is a reliable product, not a glitzy one. But some of the grace built into a product to make it look cool also can end up making it seem more intuitive to the user. I've always put a lot of thought into the UI. Maybe too much, and I'm sure your comment is meant to help us balance the two concerns. I am listening!!
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
Philosophizing here: What we really need is a "car", instead of all these throwaway junk boxes. Capitalism! Competition! It's creating huge scrap heaps! Whereas "cooperation" would produce a nice solid, reliable, simpler, and durable product, like say a stainless-steel car.
I'd like to defend the opposite opinion, but that would have to be done in the soapbox :)
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I've always put a lot of thought into the UI. Maybe too much, and I'm sure your comment is meant to help us balance the two concerns.
Maybe I'm just being religious on the subject, but I've got a good excuse; I'm wearing a developers hat. Adding Window-dressing would be a waste of system-resources, but a good marketeer will insist on it if it helps in promoting the product. Are you familiar with the UX guide[^]?
I are Troll :suss:
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BobishKindaGuy wrote:
Why a single form?
Well this makes setting up the PageBase class easier and allows for placement of session variables(or however you decide to persist user info).. all this will happen as a approximatively 1-1 mapping from a single form.. (basically this will allow you to write less code in your webapp. The reason for a separate ui solution(s) is common in the XNA community, it allows/forces all the (business) logic to be centrally located, and is just a safeguard to taking the easy road as opposed to conforming to a set of best practices. this will also allow you to do a compare against your existing code base, as long as you follow the basic solution and page layout (can be very handy for debugging unexpected behavior).
I'd blame it on the Brain farts.. But let's be honest, it really is more like a Methane factory between my ears some days then it is anything else...
Thanks again, ely_bob! I have quite a few tabbed-dialogs and wizards. What do you think of the idea of a webpage that aligns those vertically so the user work their way from the top down? There's a notepad replacement app that does that, and it looks really cool. (Of course, that app is a desktop app ha ha ha) Regarding the separate solution for the UI, do you mean separate project or separate solution completely? Either way, I guess the code in the form would look something like (air-coding here):
Public Class WizForm1
Private m_UI_Handler As SomeUIHandlingProject
Private Sub Done_Click (e,sender) Handles btnDone.Click
m_UI_Handler.WizForm1_Handlers.DoneClick
End Sub
End Class____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
modified on Thursday, July 22, 2010 5:35 PM
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BobishKindaGuy wrote:
Philosophizing here: What we really need is a "car", instead of all these throwaway junk boxes. Capitalism! Competition! It's creating huge scrap heaps! Whereas "cooperation" would produce a nice solid, reliable, simpler, and durable product, like say a stainless-steel car.
I'd like to defend the opposite opinion, but that would have to be done in the soapbox :)
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I've always put a lot of thought into the UI. Maybe too much, and I'm sure your comment is meant to help us balance the two concerns.
Maybe I'm just being religious on the subject, but I've got a good excuse; I'm wearing a developers hat. Adding Window-dressing would be a waste of system-resources, but a good marketeer will insist on it if it helps in promoting the product. Are you familiar with the UX guide[^]?
I are Troll :suss:
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Maybe I'm just being religious on the subject
No, I think your thoughts are very relevant and well-thought-out. Folks like me that have to be both the developer and marketer though, have to be sensitive to both concerns. "Way cool" means different things to different people. I don't mean window dressing, but well-thought-out intuitive placement, coloring, and response of UI elements, that help the user do the job as easily as possible. For example, one of the things I have in most windows is built-in help in a collapsible panel. To me, not wow but ease of use is "way cool". However, I did get the head of one IT dept the other day say "wow" when she saw one of my screens. That made me feel pretty good... :) I'm sure you don't mean that anything that looks good is a waste of system resources. I conclude that you must be referring to color schemes that look cool to the teeny-boppers, being dark grey with orange text and animations and so on that would tend to use processor time for little other than amusement to the developer. Hey, this IS starting to sound like a soapbox rant, isn't it!! I'll shut up now. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Maybe I'm just being religious on the subject
No, I think your thoughts are very relevant and well-thought-out. Folks like me that have to be both the developer and marketer though, have to be sensitive to both concerns. "Way cool" means different things to different people. I don't mean window dressing, but well-thought-out intuitive placement, coloring, and response of UI elements, that help the user do the job as easily as possible. For example, one of the things I have in most windows is built-in help in a collapsible panel. To me, not wow but ease of use is "way cool". However, I did get the head of one IT dept the other day say "wow" when she saw one of my screens. That made me feel pretty good... :) I'm sure you don't mean that anything that looks good is a waste of system resources. I conclude that you must be referring to color schemes that look cool to the teeny-boppers, being dark grey with orange text and animations and so on that would tend to use processor time for little other than amusement to the developer. Hey, this IS starting to sound like a soapbox rant, isn't it!! I'll shut up now. :)
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I don't mean window dressing, but well-thought-out intuitive placement, coloring, and response of UI elements, that help the user do the job as easily as possible.
That's it :thumbsup:
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
For example, one of the things I have in most windows is built-in help in a collapsible panel. To me, not wow but ease of use is "way cool". However, I did get the head of one IT dept the other day say "wow" when she saw one of my screens. That made me feel pretty good...
Hehe, that's a very cool reaction to receive! And yes, an application with a well-designed UI usually stands out. Heavy drinkers should be able to recognize a good wine :)
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I'm sure you don't mean that anything that looks good is a waste of system resources. I conclude that you must be referring to color schemes that look cool to the teeny-boppers, being dark grey with orange text and animations and so on that would tend to use processor time for little other than amusement to the developer.
Your conclusion is almost correct, the colorscheme had a gradient lightblue instead of dark gray.
I are Troll :suss:
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BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I don't mean window dressing, but well-thought-out intuitive placement, coloring, and response of UI elements, that help the user do the job as easily as possible.
That's it :thumbsup:
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
For example, one of the things I have in most windows is built-in help in a collapsible panel. To me, not wow but ease of use is "way cool". However, I did get the head of one IT dept the other day say "wow" when she saw one of my screens. That made me feel pretty good...
Hehe, that's a very cool reaction to receive! And yes, an application with a well-designed UI usually stands out. Heavy drinkers should be able to recognize a good wine :)
BobishKindaGuy wrote:
I'm sure you don't mean that anything that looks good is a waste of system resources. I conclude that you must be referring to color schemes that look cool to the teeny-boppers, being dark grey with orange text and animations and so on that would tend to use processor time for little other than amusement to the developer.
Your conclusion is almost correct, the colorscheme had a gradient lightblue instead of dark gray.
I are Troll :suss:
You are way cool :)
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Mycroft Holmes wrote:
the latest MS demos seem to lean almost exclusively to EF as the DAL
Sorry, what is EF?
____________________________________________________________________________________ The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
MS Enterprise Library, my error. The slap happened over 10 years ago and it was performed by another senior dev who pointed out that we did not need remote connection as a connectionstring would suffice nicely.
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.
My thoughts, if you find them useful. While the technical aspects are important, you also need to consider the business aspects. In general people pay less for things over the web, but you probably have access to more potential customers. So it depends on your market size, how large is your current customer base and does it have the potential to grow larger by going web. If your market is a niche then it may be lttle point. WinForms to Silverlight Experience ==================================== We have an airplane flight mapping WinForms app and have done a basic silverlight version. What we have learnt is that Bing maps can't handle the sheer number of points we would like to draw, so we often go into some kind of compromise, less frame per second etc. This is just an example of the broader point that for graphics intensive apps the desktop is a better performer. The other thing we noticed is that it was much easier to make a series of silverlight app as seperate web pages to do only one or two functions from our WinForm app. When we tried to combine many functions together into one silverlight page then little things started happening like the datagrids started slowing down when scrolling. I think this was due to a few reasons, unoptimised code, inexperience with Xaml, extra code complexity, lack of maturity of silverlight tools and controls. We still code in vs2008 and its xaml parsing is terrible,badly formed xaml can be hard to find. I assume its got better in vs2010, but i have heard bad reports of vs2010 and i await a service pack. If you think it it going to take you 1 year to migrate then silverlight will be mature by then i would suspect. I have seen the silverlight related products mature even in the 12 motnhs we have used it. If you do go the silverlight path I would choose one aspect of your app and move it first to silverlight as a test case. We are happy with the final result as the UI is much easier to use than our WinForms app and has all the deployment and update benefits you get from a web app.