6th June 2006
We’ve heard reports that Fasthosts have been moving over existing ASP.NET 1.1 web sites to ASP.NET 2.0 without giving any warning.
ASP.NET 2.0 is somewhat backwards compatible with ASP.NET 1.1 - but it’s not 100% compatible and to get it to work, the software should be properly migrated. If your hosting provider simply changes an existing 1.1 application over to use ASP.NET 2.0, it will probably break the site.
Changing all the sites to use .NET 2.0 doesn’t seem to make much sense. .NET is designed so that different versions can be run on the same machine simultaneously, and we’ve got quite a few servers that are running both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 web applications just fine. Installing .NET 2.0 does not automatically change the version of all of your web sites, so why they would do this deliberately is anyone’s guess.
If you are running any .NET 1.1 web applications on shared hosting, we strongly recommend that you contact the hosting provider to check if they will be installing .NET 2.0 in the future, and if so ensure that your web site remains on ASP.NET 1.1.
If they cannot guarantee that your site will not be upgraded to .NET 2.0, you will need to have your site migrated to .NET 2.0 or move to another hosting provider.
On a positive note, it’s at least good to see that hosting companies are now starting to roll out .NET 2.0. We’ve been waiting for some time for widespread support of .NET 2.0 on shared hosting accounts and as yet have been limited to working with .NET 2.0 on sites that will be limited to dedicated servers.