Upgrading from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, what to expect?

Question

I'm working on a big .NET 1.1 project, and there exists a wish to upgrade this, majorily to be able to use better tools like Visual Studio 2008, but also because of the new features and smaller amount of bugs in the .NET 2.0 framework.

The project consist for the bigger part of VB.NET, but there are also parts in C#. It is a Windows Forms application, using various third party controls. Using .NET remoting the rich client talks to a server process which interfaces with a MSSQL 2000 database.

What kind of issues can we expect in case we decide to perform the upgrade?

Answer 1

There is a change to the theading model in .Net 2.0 onwards where unhandled exceptions in a thread will cause the whole app to terminate. I ran into this when updating an app that did lots of threading and occasionally crashed. Obviously the .Net 2.0 model is more robust as you should certainly be catching these anyway, but it was the only really issue I came across when making the migration.

This article talks all about it: http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2005/12/14/2618.aspx

Answer 2

We're looking at doing the same migration right now Tobi. First, you can get a good idea of what to expect by making a copy of your project (or a portion of it) and give it a "dry run" through the .NET 2.0 compiler. My experience with this was that the 2.0 compiler gives more warnings about bad programming practices that the 1.1 compiler let slide. The compiler will warn you about implicit casts, "ambiguous" return paths (a code path where a function doesn't return a value), and some other minor things.

Here's a few links that you might find helpful: .NET Framework Compatability

Word Document of Breaking changes in .NET Framework 2.0