Difference between ASP and ASP.net

Upgrading ASP to ASP.NET

ASP (Active Server Pages) is Microsoft’s early foray into the server side scripting engines that were meant to dynamically create web pages as they are needed. An example of a dynamically created web page is an on-line calculator where you input two number and after you’re done it presents you with the sum. Creating that in HTML would require a lot of pages, one for each possible result. But with ASP, you can write a single short script that can handle this easily. ASP has seen a fair share in the internet creating pages on the fly. But on January 5, 2002 Microsoft released the successor of ASP called ASP.NET.

ASP.NET aims to make the transition to web programming easier for those who are already knowledgeable in creating programs for Windows.  ASP.NET also offered some improvements over its predecessor. Here are some of the advantages of ASP.NET over ASP:

• ASP.NET takes advantage of the additional features in the .NET library allowing its pages to be coded in any of the other languages included in .NET.
• ASP.NET also has a very wide array of libraries and controls that can be used to build a web page quickly and easily. It also had a lot of the commonly used templates like menus.
• Error Handling has also been improved compared to ASP by making use of the try-catch blocks and exception handling.
• A compiled code format allowed ASP.NET scripts to perform faster during execution since it doesn’t need to be compiled by the server when called. It also meant a lot less errors when it is already deployed since errors were easily found when you attempt to compile a script.

One of the best improvements of ASP.NET is the use of a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) control creation system, that gave developers a GUI that helps them gain a quick visual feedback on the look of their page.

With all these improvements, it’s easy to see why most web page creators have steadily migrated towards the .NET version of ASP. Although coders still use some form of the classic ASP’s code, this might just because of the length of time that they coded in ASP; ‘Old habits die hard’ as they say.

Books about ASP and ASP.net.

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