Is it recommended to change the application's architecture to a distributed application environment in this case ?

Hello,

I have recently hired by a company, and my first task is to guess why an ASP.NET 2.0 website is having timeout and no-answer problems sometimes.

This application is used for about 50 stores to control employee's work times and related stuff: They connect first, to a VPN and then access the internal intranet ASP.NET webpage.

As far as I've seen, it uses ADO.net with non-strongly-typed datasets (so oldie I know), and for every little operation like changing a record, they use SQL Server transactions with Read Commited locks. They work as expected and the structure seems well defined, as it does not introduce global uncontrolled deadlocks afaik. And some employees told me that the problems had been corrected, as they do not happen right now.

BUT... (here we go) my boss ask me if we should change the ARCHITECTURE for the application and use a DISTRIBUTED APPLICATION approach, changing then to WCF, SOAP, WEB SERVICES... And so on. This is a big change that would take muuch more than three months to achieve, specially because I am specialized in Windows Desktop applications, not ASP.NET (newbie) ... So, my deal is to not change to a distributed application. Instead, try to GUESS STEP BY STEP and, find the exact points where the application is being slow, and testing different ways to optimize existing ASP.NET code (as I find that the volume data is not so huge, and all the operations takes only miliseconds to calculate, so the concurrency problems seems minimal).

What is your opinion ? Do you know by the way, a way to debug a PRODUCTION ASP.NET website ? Something like "remote debug" ?

My company needs (as always they need) fast answers fast resolutions and cheap costs...

Thanks in advance !

Roger

Re: Is it recommended to change the application's architecture to a distributed application environment in this case ?

Rewriting an application without good reason seems pointless under any circumstances. At the moment, you don't know if the app has any problems, or what they are if they exist. It might be that the SQL Server is the issue. .NET code won't help there. It might be a hardware issue. SOAP won't wash that away.

If the users still have to connect via the VPN and their only interface is whatever web forms currently exist, then using Web Services won't add any value. You should only look to use those if you want to expose services to different clients, such as desktop apps, phone apps etc.

I would continue troubleshooting the existing app. Add some logging and monitoring components.

Here's how to remotely debug an ASP.NET app: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910448

Re: Is it recommended to change the application's architecture to a distributed application environment in this case ?

Thanks for all your information ! I see that the way 2 go seems clear now and I was not too wrong 8-D

Best regards,

Roger