- Clients
- Snak Appeal · Trend & Thomas
- Sector
- Small businesses
- Role
- Architect, developer and reviewer
- Period
- July 2026
The situation
Both businesses had been clients of Infobox Media, the consultancy our founder co-founded, for more than a decade, and both depended on systems whose frameworks were long out of support.
Snak Appeal's franchise ordering system dated from 2015 and ran on .NET Framework WebForms. When its old server failed, franchisees could not place orders. Trend & Thomas relied on a 2011 VB.NET application on .NET 3.5 for its job records, sales ledger and financial reporting.
What we did
- Wrote the plan first: a page-by-page map from old to new, and a security checklist
- Rebuilt like-for-like on .NET 10 and Razor Pages, with AI coding agents writing code under constant review
- Mapped EF Core onto the existing databases, so no data migration was needed
- Replaced home-grown sign-in with ASP.NET Core Identity — Snak Appeal's franchisees kept their existing passwords, now stored securely
- Made order placement a single transaction, with stock checked and updated together
- Fixed long-standing reporting defects — including filters that had never matched and a leap-year bug — rather than porting them
- Added automated browser tests that must pass before every deployment
The outcome
Snak Appeal went from plan to live for all 61 franchisees in six days. Trend & Thomas's rebuild was live four days after work began. Both now run on a supported framework, with tests that make them safe to change.
What AI changed, and what it didn't
The agents wrote most of the code. Choosing the target architecture, writing the specification, reviewing every change and recognising when the output was wrong stayed with an experienced engineer — and that is what made the result safe to run.
What changed is the economics. Modernisation that a small business could never have justified is now affordable.