Life After ASP
Ben Forta
Table of Contents
Microsoft ASP is one of the most popular scripting languages out there, or rather, it was one of the most popular scripting languages out there. With the introduction of the Microsoft .NET platform, Microsoft is no longer developing ASP; it's investing in ASP.NET instead. ASP.NET is an entirely new language with powerful new capabilities, but it is not ASP.
To be fair, it is important to note that existing applications won't just stop working, and existing ASP applications will likely run for quite a while. It is possible to run both traditional ASP and new ASP.NET applications at once. Installing .NET (and ASP.NET) does not preclude the use of the existing ASP engine. But to leverage the new features and technologies in ASP.NET as it continues to evolve and innovate, developers will need to learn ASP.NET. And learning ASP.NET is not just a matter of learning new language syntax, ASP.NET introduces an entirely new development model and a whole new way to think about building applications. Microsoft is very honest about this, and states the following in an MSDN article on migrating ASP to ASP.NET:
If you have ASP development skills, the new ASP.NET programming model will seem very familiar to you. However, the ASP object model has undergone significant changes to make it more structured and object-oriented, so most existing ASP pages will have to be modified to some extent in order to run under ASP.NET. Major changes to Visual Basic .NET as well mean that existing ASP pages written with Visual Basic Scripting Edition typically will not port directly to ASP.NET.
The truth is, ASP and ASP.NET have little in common besides their names and syntactical similarities to Visual Basic.
