ProboData group publishes a commercial software package used in reporting and cost accounting for very large projects.  For example, their software has been used in tracking and reporting on expenses for GPS Satellites, fighter jet development, and many other multi-billion dollar projects.  We were brought aboard initially to maintain the existing ASP Classic website, but the project evolved into ongoing enhancement.

The initial goal was to upgrade the development processes for the company.  Development was being done and tested directly on the server with no source control to maintain a history of changes. Business logic was implemented in stored procedures on the server and so was difficult to create automatic tests.  The entire system was built in ASP Classic and the business owner wanted to update the technology to improve the performance.

Since development was being done and tested directly on the server we first introduced source control and a CI/CD Pipeline to deploy new builds.  We then assisted in reviewing the installed tech stack of IIS6 and SQL 7, and updating it to modern standards while keeping the installed base of ASP Classic logic and pages.

Once the deployment and development procedures were stable, we incrementally updated the ASP Classic pages to .Net Framework using ASP MVC.  As .Net Core was introduced we began slowly moving to a REST approach, using javascript on the ASP Classic pages to query the REST API for data.  This allowed us to begin using the power and flexibility of .Net Core while avoiding the unnecessary effort and expense of migrating the UI to a new technology.