I am maintaining an internal website for handling our business. The website is running on a Windows 2003 server that is five+ years old and is using both ASP.NET 1.1 and even older CGI-BIN code written in Visual Basic 6 with some other components like Crystal Reports. Also, it is using MySQL 5.0.27 as database.
As the website is hard to maintain, poorly written code, I would like to upgrade it to a modern version of .NET. I have already written some new functions in 4.0 and also tried MVC and Razor which I like. The question is then, how shall I proceed to upgrade the website?
Can I use .NET 4.0 on the old server in parallel to .NET 1.1 and then do a rewrite page by page? Or should I do a total rewrite? (Which would be very nice but hard to do as I still would have to maintain the old site.)
My ultimate goal is to make the webpage easier to maintain and easier to move to another server before the current breaks.
Yes you can run 4.0 side by sdie with 1.1 as described here. If you have a testing server or a development machine i would load/install dot net 4 on that machine and just rebuild the site in asp.net 4.0 while still maintaining the 1.1 version once you have completed the new version then take down the old version and upload the new version.