Big Chief Golf

One of my longest-running side projects is a website called BigChiefGolf.com. This website provides a free service to golfers, helping them to maintain their golf scores and view a trend-line of handicap improvement over time.

The most amazing thing about this service is that it has been up and running for almost 15 years in various forms, with amazingly little maintenance or revision. There have been a couple of major phases of revision, first from QuickBasic to Visual Basic, and then to ASP.Net.

I recently got it up and running on ASP.Net 2.0, which was an interesting experience. While porting the majority of libraries and even Windows apps appears to be fairly straightforward, porting the ASP.Net pages was particularly challenging. Firstly, while everything else seems to work fine in some sort of compatibility mode between 1.1 and 2.0 - i.e. I'm able to just use the old 1.1 binaries in many cases - the web stuff absolutely would not work. Then even after recompiling everything else to 2.0, the web stuff still did not work. I think the first reason for this was that they have changed the name of an important page-level attribute from "Codepage" to "CodeFile". Here's an article on MSDN that discusses this. Without this the page can't even compile with 2.0, and so an IIS error occurs right away if you try to access the page.

The second, and more substantial porting task is to change all of the code-behind files to partial classes - the new 2.0 model uses partial classes instead of inheritance to define the code behind an ASP.Net page. This involves, obviously, putting the "partial" keyword in the definition of each code-behind class. Then you need to remove and clean up certain things - in particular, the definitions of all controls should just be removed. With the partial classes approach, those controls are already declared in the portion of the class generated from the ASP code. This is much nicer for new development, as it leads to simpler and less code, but it certainly made porting a chore.

One final thing I had to spend a good amount of effort to fix was to reformat a lot of my HTML as conformant XHTML - i.e. closing my <img src="" /> tags, <br> tags, etc. When I compiled the site initially, after everything else was compiling OK, I was left with hundreds of these schema validation errors. I believe there might be some way to turn off this particular level of validation and remove these errors without fixing anything. But I figured I might as well go ahead and get it done, to ensure my code would compile on any computer with VS.Net, even with the default settings.