VWG Migration First Steps

The following steps describe a basic migration of a Visual WebGUI application to a Web Application based on Wisej.NET.

With Wisej.NET, it's so much easier to migrate your existing Visual WebGUI application.

To do so, we have prepared this checklist to guide you through the process.

1. Make sure to install Wisej.NET's VSIX package from Wisej.NET Build page

2. Take note of all embedded resources, references and build customizations within the Project

Make sure that you have a backup ready of your application before proceeding with the migration process to prevent loss of critical data or source code.

From this point, you can choose one of two options to migrate your solution, either upgrading to the New Project SDK Format or staying with the current Project Format.

SDK Project Format

Starting with Wisej.NET 3, we started supporting .NET 6. This enabled Wisej.NET to be cross-platform, and added many more features like Dependency Injection, running in a Docker Container, and much more.

You can check out the New SDK Project Format Migration from our guide to migrating WinForms to Wisej.NET.

MSBuild Project Format

Changing the project type from Visual WebGUI to Wisej.NET can be done in two ways

1. Creating a new Wisej.NET project and copying over all the files from the original Visual WebGUI application.

2. Change the settings of the existing project

If you decide to go with Option 1, everything is done automatically. i.e all the configuration files and assemblies will be added automatically

Changing the settings of an existing project

Open your .csproj file and proceed with the following modification:

1. Remove the {563295b5-8906-4a76-be2d-ff8e711c1204} project type GUID from the ProjectGuid node

2. Change the target .NET Framework version to .NET Framework 4.8

3. Add Wisej.NET's NuGet package from the NuGet Package Manager

4. Remove all references to Visual WebGUI assemblies

5. Add the configuration files to the project. You will need the following files A. Default.html B. Default.json C. Web.config

6. Replace all occurrences of Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms with Wisej.Web

7. Remove the remaining usings of Gizmox.WebGUI.*

   

   Replacing all occurrences of Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms with Wisej.Web
8. Build the application and resolve the compiler errors: in most of the cases you will get compiler errors due to some missing properties and/or methods that are obsolete in Wisej. You can simply comment out these. There are also enumerations that have been changed to be more meaningful for a web application. Below is a table with the replacements for some of these

Visual WebGUI	Wisej
FormStartPosition.WindowsDefaultLocation	FormStartPosition.DefaultLocation
FormBorderStyle.FixedDialog	FormBorderStyle.Fixed
BorderStyle.FixedSingle	BorderStyle.Solid
BorderStyle.Fixed3D	BorderStyle.Solid
Shortcut.Del	Shortcut.Delete
Shortcut.ShiftDel	Shortcut.ShiftDelete
Shortcut.CtrlIns	Shortcut.CtrlInsert
Shortcut.ShiftIns	Shortcut.ShiftInsert
Shortcut.AltBksp	Shortcut.AltBackspace

The configuration files are generated by default when creating a new Wisej.NET project. You can simply copy them over from a new project, but make sure to edit Default.json file with the correct namespace so that it points to the corresponding Program.Main method.

For more information regarding Wisej.NET configuration, please head over to the respective documentation page.

When using NuGet packages, it's highly recommended that you use the newer PackageReference syntax for your package management as opposed to the older Packages.config file.

Our documentation covers how to correctly configure Visual Studio to use this new standard.

Visual WebGUI Context Replacements

Visual WebGUI	Wisej
Gizmox.WebGUI.Common.Global.Context	Application.Session
VWGContext.Current.MainForm	Application.Session.MainForm
VWGContext.Current.Cookies	Application.Cookies