PHP vs ASP.net

[ang_bain]

I've been a .net/asp developer for over 10 years but since joining webmasterworld i have noticed a big following of phper's...whats the story...anyone up for discussion...is php better than .net for web stuff or is it just personal preference..please the floor is open...

[Gibble]

That being said if you have an ASP.NET AJAX application fire up Fire Bug and check out how much extra crap gets thrown around with requests.

Don't use the crap ajax stuff MS provides.

[httpwebwitch]

Having developed extensively in both, I strongly prefer PHP, especially PHP5 with its stronger OOP capabilities. I'll use .NET at my day job, but for personal projects I do everything on LAMP.

.NET has a lot of nifty built-in toys & components, but I found that in order to get good clean markup in the output I usually had to rewrite things from scratch in C# anyways. But it is a great environment, and I do like that C# is a strongly-typed language.

Another point worth noting: for very high-volume apps or web services .NET gets you to compile your code, and it really does perform faster than PHP. If you're, say, doing 5000 XSLT transformations per second (a busy XML-based web service), it matters.