Written by Mark Pringle | Last Updated on Wednesday, January 04, 2023

ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET Version: 6.0 General Information

Well, this should be fun…

I am a self-taught ASP.NET C# web developer. While my formal education is in Visual Design and User Experience Engineering, much of my recent life has revolved around building web communities and websites as a Full Stack .Net developer. All the websites I own and operate were built using ASP.NET Web Forms using C#.

ASP.NET Web Forms allows you to build dynamic websites using a drag-and-drop, event-driven model while enabling you to think of your "forms" as a unit, not as separate client and server pieces (keep this in mind). It is an excellent web framework for rapidly building user interface-driven websites with database access (Microsoft SQL Server is my relational database of choice).

The problem with Web Forms is that it is not designed to separate UI (client), controller, and business logic (server logic). It is deceptively easy to put all the C# code into an ASPX page and its CodeBehind (.cs) source code. In the long term, this approach makes it extremely hard to maintain applications and find logic when needed. Additionally, there are other Web Forms shortcomings, which I will not get into right now.

With these things in mind, I have decided to migrate my Web Form applications to .Net core, starting with the least monolithic sites. Migrating Web Forms to Core is problematic because these technologies have different approaches that require two different ways of thinking. Additionally, it is cumbersome and time-consuming to migrate "broad" websites. Nevertheless, there are inherent long-term advantages to making this change.

ASP.Net Core provides better performance, is lightweight, and can be developed and run across different platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. Additionally, a robust community of over 60,000 developers and 3,700 companies supports this approach. And as you may know, only sometimes do programmers write code from the ground up; we often get code from other developers and modify it. 

If you are an ASP.NET developer and have migrated Web Form sites or applications to .Net Core, please provide some tips below. Feel free to reach out to me and talk about your migration experiences.