Doing Maintenance on ASP sucks!

RANT WARNING!

Firstly a whinge about ASP classic and yet another case of failing to keep pace.  Whilst I understand there are loads of classic asp pages out there (and these can be quite good), sometimes I wish things would move along with the times.  What I mean is no-one has really maintained the pile of cr*p pages I’ve been lumbered with (for the 2nd time!),  save where a functional change is required. No Housekeeping has ever been performed, so it has become more difficult to maintain. its totally frustrating!!

Heres why I hate the way this particular “web app” is structured:

1. Easy To Break: Changing something simple can break some other function that worked previously extremely easily, i.e. changing something like the format of data coming out can break other things.
2. Lack Of Modularity: i.e. it isn’t written in a way you can alter parts of it without affecting others significantly, and it is written in a scripting style.
3. Post-back Data Difficult to keep: Adding your own session handling is a labourious task, especially between post-backs.
4. it is a Security Nightmare for the DB: especially when considering the asp web in question has a place to put your own sql, leaving it open to SQL injection attacks galore! – I have raised this as a concern with management but the as the system is internal they do not think its a threat. (a bit naive I think on their part….as this would allow anyone, if you knew what you were doing, blatantly to hack our live database!)
5. Poorly Maintained: any functional changes to this code have been “Bodged” , wthout any proper thought. Unfortunately this breeds the “Bodge” Approach so that the application never really becomes clean.

I think I’ve been lumbered with the functional changes, because none of the other developers will or are inclined to touch it with a barge pole. The insulting part is that I’m in the process of becoming an MCPD Enterprise Applications in .Net 2.0 (with 3.5 to follow), having already qualified as Windows Developer. So I feel it’s totally wasting the skills I’ve picked up. As you can imagine this can be demoralising.  

Now before you go “stop moaning, Why don’t you Migrate it to .Net?” … I have also suggested and looked into it but because “it’s an internal application”, I’m told it doesn’t warrant a proper and much needed face-lift, so won’t be given the time.

Also, I reckon at first glance, the conversion would probably take around 4-6 man weeks and some testing besides to complete. Time unfortunately I don’t have spare (I do have a life!),

But i’m willing to look at ways the problems can be resolved incrementally.

So,  bearing in mind that this is an Internal Application not directly affecting the customer, but helps in internal functions i.e. support and development, the question is this; should it stay on classic ASP, because it works and has done for 10 years? Or does the application need to be migrated, to bring the benefits of having better support,  quicker to write new functionality, additional modularity and security features? 

Also, What arguments are there for migrating and against? And could there be a way to migrate slowly? For example could the classic ASP Pages hook off a serviced component written in .Net, rather than VB6 MTS ? Something to think about…