About a month ago, I had to create a new company and along with it, a new web site.  Since I've used FrontPage for simple web sites for quite a period of time, that is usually my first choice.

My idea was to get the site up and running so that I have a presence, then migrate the site to ASP.NET so I can take advantage of some of the new features built into Visual Studio 2005.

Well, it turns out that I may need to perform that conversion soon, rather than later, so I started doing some research into requirements for performing the conversion.

I didn't find a whole lot of information about the process other than it's a web site and VS2005 can import an existing web site as a project.  I did find at least one tool that was supposed to help you with the transition.  I also saw quite a bit of conversation about ASP.NET and FrontPage Extensions getting into arguments, etc.  Anyway, I thought it wouldn't hurt to try a conversion experiment to see what happened.

So, I created a working directory on my test server, republished the site to that folder, and opened it with VS2005.

One of the features I like about FrontPage is the ability to create "include" files that can be referenced from other pages. This is great for things like menus, logos, copyrights, etc. and it really cuts down on maintenance because you only have a single location to edit.

When VS2005 imported the FrontPage web site, it converted all of the includes to static text or images within each page.  This is not a bad thing and it actually saved me some work.

In the current site design, the main page has one design and each subsequent page pretty much follows the same design, look and feel, etc.  A perfect opportunity to utilize the Master Pages feature in VS2005.

I created a master page, copied the common content from one of the other pages, and put a "content placeholder" at the location where page-specific content would be placed.

I then created "content pages" for each of the pages in the site ( with the exception of the home page ). This operation was nothing more than creating a new ASPX web form page, associating it with a Master Page, and copying the content from the old HTML page.

I then created a new default.aspx page and copied the content from the old index.html page to the new default.

Finally, I patched up all of the links by searching for ".htm" and replacing it with ".aspx" and I was pretty much done.

Now I've played around with Master Pages a little in the past and I have almost zero content on my existing site; so taking those things into consideration, I have to tell you that it only took me about an hour to convert the whole site from FrontPage to ASP.NET.

What's Next? 

So now the easy part is over. The reason I started this process was to enable additional security features and a create restricted sub-sites for customer and internal use.

Security won't be an issue because the new ASP.NET has a membership component built-in that will enable me to control access to the site based on a login ID.

In fact, the biggest challenge I face will be moving the solution from my development environment to GoDaddy, my hosting platform.