Modernizing .NET Applications

Chapter 2. What You Have Running Right Now

In Chapter 1, we established that there are business benefits, technical benefits, and human benefits to running adaptable, maintainable software. Sounds like a place you want to be! But if your company is like most, you’re not starting with a blank slate. No, you have years’ worth (decades’ worth, even) of .NET software that runs your company. That’s your starting point. Before we shift to the new-and-exciting aspects of modern .NET, it’s important to catalog our current state. Why? It’s difficult to clearly see the value of new paradigms unless you recognize the pain of where you are today. And to get a sense for what “better” looks like, you must have a baseline.

In this chapter, we look at a few areas that reflect your (likely) current state. For each, I outline the implications and your motivation to change.

You Have Many Different .NET Project Types

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to .NET projects. From the beginning, Microsoft offered different types of projects for each scenario. Need a component? Create a class library. Building a website or web service? Choose from a few options. Building a smart client for the desktop or a background service for the server? Yup, we have those handled, too.

Anyone using .NET for a decade or longer has these types of applications running somewhere:

Windows Forms application

Run thick-client applications on the desktop. These are user-driven applications built with rich UI controls ...