Execute ASP code from ASP.NET: is it a weird idea?
Often we have to integrate existing work with new technologies and frameworks. We can sell a migration of a site written in ASP to ASP.NET: our customer understands only that they have a similar name but we know that they have nothing in common. No sharing of session state, ASP.NET cannot apply his security to a resource mapped on different ISAPI (e.g. ASP pages), etc.
So, reading a couple of old articles of Dino Esposito from MSDN Magazine 2000, it was born a little crazy idea: execute ASP code from ASP.NET.
The solution consists in mapping ASP files to the aspnet_isapi.dll and writing a simple HttpHandler that executes ASP code with a simple COM object written in Visual Basic 6.0.
The simplest part is executing ASP, add minimal Request and Response objects support, as just demonstrated in the Dino's articles.
The hard part is to rebuild all classic ASP Objects (Request, Response, Server, etc) and fit them in the new execution environment.
Is it a so weird idea?