Painful was an understatement. Initially I was under pressure to find a job quickly and this paid ok. Then I tried too hard to fix things, I should have quit an hour in... Reasons for where they got to imo .. Misled non technical management, a priority on marketing, political division along dev/design lines and an old guard with speed, but no control or experience on their side from the start leading to a protective attitude. Speed to deliver was the ONLY consideration when I was there. As a result there was no time to fix anything even when experienced devs like me tried to put pressure on. Of course every project was underestimated with the lack of documentation leading to scope creep, overruns and customer disatisfaction from project inception. Product would have been brand new around 2009, ASP web forms was old even then. Only 1 original dev left, and a contractor that seemed to get work intermittently but never actually work/talk with anyone in the team. The original founder was kept around as a consultant, lol... This guy interviewed me, with the other original dev, and one question they posed was a simple relational data model question. Then when I hit the actual code I found they had no foreign keys defined, only indexes. I raised this in a formal review down the line, and was given a 5/10 grade for my work lol I'm currently on the bench as a carer, not employed since Covid redundancy so I have too much time to mull over this stuff. The organisational problems are interesting, and help understand the "how the F..." but from your response I am sure you don't have to worry about this junk. The tech stack is old and knackered and, imo, not really the platform I would have used even back in the 90's. One note of caution - watch out for use of the "viewstate". Check any page in your browser with form controls (or not sometimes) and look for a massive utf8 encoded field(s). Depending on if this is a public website or not, and your customers level of security paranoia, you might want to look into getting an upgrade to a later version of the .net framework at a minimum (4.8) and ensure you turn on the relevant secure features (machine id and encryption I believe are the keywords there).

I've awoken my old account just to chime in on this as I've had some recent, terrible experience here that might help. I'll try to keep my rants to a minimum. Sadly my last position was working in this tech stack, with over 150 customers using various versions of the product. - Business logic strewn throughout SQL procs, UI and a little bit of mis-informed backend abstractions coupled with embedded and sitewide javascript. - No source control, at all :mad:. - Zero, or inadequate out of date documentation. - Team works on network shares. - Manual deployment. - No IDE or any other tooling (except for SQL Management studio). - Building was done using cmd scripts split into arbitrary "modules" due to the limitations of the command buffer string length. - Versioning on live system was mandated - rename the old file with a date, and leave it there. - Sometime in the past they switched from VB to C# which was the dominant language when I started. The mix led to some awful days where I realised I had to touch the VB, and those days were long, unproductive, usually doomed to fail. Staff turnover (all senior devs) was 100% for new hires, lasting from 4 months to 1.5 yrs (me, the fool). 10 years of constant losses, mostly negative customer relations with some "entrenched" customers buying out the parent company on more than 2 occasions to keep their critical systems from vaporising led to my current attitude to this type of product.. return to the ship and nuke it from orbit. Seriously though, I would park it in a vm(s), charge a fortune for anything that needs change management. "Try" to fix any security holes that are essential, but first try to mitigate those within your new virtual infrastructure if you can first. Product is not cost effective, and the customer needs to understand that through passing on that aspect of the business. If cost is not an issue, maybe think about selling it on to an outfit that doesn't mind/understand financial loss, the technical debt or the talent attrition it will cause :suss:. You mentioned updating the html/css and providing a more modern approach to responsivness. The product I worked with had all that already and still had the above issues. My opinion is that it will not improve your developers lives, nor maintenance timescales, but might reduce the front end developers attrition in the long run. It might also increase the appeal of the application to the customer, making it seem "better". Do you really want that? Moving to C# might seem like a good plan, b