Moving to 2.0 and other goodness

What a week of living H-E-double-hockey-sticks as I've had about 10 hours of sleep for the entire week (which is a bit low even for me) and basically got very little done. Two things that I wanted to mention though.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of working with Kit George, the Program Manager for the CLR team at Microsoft. The CLR team was in Calgary these past few days (and have been in Canada for the past week) helping out customers with some compatibility testing with the 2.0 framework. It was great talking to Kit and found a few intersting facts out I didn't know. There are about 66 developers on the CLR team alone which gives you a real idea of how big the entire team is (so add on project/program managers, architects, testers, etc.). Oh yeah, and if you're looking forward to the GZipStream class coming in System.IO.Compression like I am (goodbye SharpZipLib!), you can thank Kit. That's his baby.

If you're looking for a migration path then I suggest you install the framework. Really. Just install it. You can get the redist here which, like it's 1.1 cousin, is just a single 20mb setup.exe that you run. Install it on a development server and in your Web Site properties in IIS just retarget it for 2.0. No iisreset needed. No reboot required. Your 1.1 ASP.NET apps should work fine (they'll be a short JIT when someone accesses them for the first time). We only did a small test (3 or 4 apps) but the 30 or so others running on that server didn't show any issues and nobody reported any problems. Try it out for awhile like that. Then you can think about the recompiling of apps, which is a different issue than just retargeting for the platform. The retargeting and installation of the 2.0 framework is pretty simple. We did find a silly problem sometimes because the ViewState was cached, so just relaunch your browser to fix it. This was when we were in the middle of a task, retargeted the system, then just tried carrying on from there. Not something you would normally do. If you do deploy and try testing but still find any issues you might want to drop a note off to Kit and his team.

If you're looking to recompile (and you will at some point) then you'll need of course Visual Studio and all that jazz. While the retargeting is simple and the team says it'll probably work fine 99% of the time (there will be those off things that are exceptions, again if you come across them let Microsoft know!) it's the recompiling that's going to bite you. I've been recompiling apps here at work from time to time (what else does a geek like me do on his lunchbreak?) to see what kind of issues there are (not testing the apps, just recompiling the solutions) and there are some deprecated things that you'll need to rework your code at some point (one of the biggest ones is system.configuration). The other thing is splitting up of assemblies. Let's say you have a common assembly for logging or something that 10 ASP.NET apps use. You can't be expected to upgrade all 10 apps at the same time as the testing effort might be too much to bear. So you'll be in a mixed mode scenario where your environment might be targetted for 2.0 and a few of the apps are native 2.0 (migrated and recompiled) but others (like common assemblies) are still 1.1. This is the scenario that needs the most testing and you'll probably stumble over issues (DateTime serialization being one of the biggest ones). So just something to watch out for and that there's going to be some work migrating to 2.0.

Finally Serge posted a great example in the comments from Thursdays post of how he accesses the SQL directly for retrieving things from a command line (via bcp but you can do it with osql as well). He did say that he tried my Wrapper classes but they didn't provide enough depth of functionality and were a bit of work. This resonates with me that I need to shift a bunch of focus on the library and make it useful instead of a bit of a toy which is what it kind of is right now. If I'm going to go around preaching for people to write remote apps I feel that I should provide you with an easy to use and rich tool to do this. So I will be getting back to putting more time into the wrappers and hopefully provide a complete set of objects that anyone can use for any purpose. Web Services are still slower than the Object Model but the advantage is that you don't have to run it directly on the server and some caching might be able to speed things up a bit. I think it'll be a long time before Microsoft does something like make the SharePoint object model remotable (if ever) so hopefully this will help in the meantime.