IAN ESCARRO

SharpIgnite, A Necessary Mess we have to Endure

August 28, 2024

Yes, it's a mess. It's legacy code. Here we are maintaining legacy codes and it is as old as it is, it's surely a mess. But a mess we need to organize a bit that it's a transitionary before we migrate the whole solution to .Net Core MVC. Which we can claim later the benefits of a proper modern web application.

This problem has been bugging us for a couple of months now and it needs to be improved if not resolved. The idea is it should be easy to migrate to .Net Core MVC soon.

The hack? SharpIgnite. It's a small application framework on top of ASP.NET webforms. The model? It's our custom simple implementation of ActiveRecord. The view? Its a custom web UserControl (ascx). And the controller is inspired by .Net Core MVC and a little bit of Rails and a little bit of Laravel :) Methods are implemented just like the way it is in Core MVC, simpler maybe and has few little bugs here and there. The only thing we need to remove is the namespace import by the time we might be able to migrate to .Net Core MVC. In theroy that is, specifics like SessionSet might need little improvements.

It is a mess, yes. But a necessary mess for the time being and by God we pray and pray the framework be obsolete soon. It'll be a waste I know but a bountiful experience it is. The challenges of simplifying the usage and the thought process of how components go together. It was well worth it. It doesn’t matter that the codebase be beautiful but we sacrifice it just so it will be much easier to migrate.

And by the time we migrate it should just take a day or two, maybe less than a week before we move to testing the projects. We also open sourced it, so hopefully it can help other people with easy migration from old webforms to .Net Core.

ABOUT IAN ESCARRO

Founded ICE Solutions.