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But in all seriousness I just cant figure out why to bother with ASP.net can someone with out a bunch of attitude like "you would be stupid to ever use asp" explain the benefits of learning yet another reinvention of a propriotory software? I have checked out PHP makes ASP look like rocket science, but havent commited to changing anything yet, if it aint broke dont fix it (WHERE current_money = Future_money)
You can write most code in ASP.Net/VB.Net in roughly the same way as you do with ASP/VBScript.
In ASP.Net, there's equavalents to most of the ASP objects. You can still Response.write your ouput to the browser, you can still use The Session object. And you can still use COM, so you don't have to ditch RecordSets for DataSets just yet.
You will immediately see an improvement in performance as the bytecode for VB will run faster than the interpreted VBScript.
As you get used to the environment, you can learn the new features of ASP.Net at your own pace and slowly switch over to the .Net way of doing things, taking advantage of new features where it makes sense.
You're not the last to migrate though. There are a lot of asp 1.0-3.0 adopters that didn't migrate to .net for lots of reasons. Here are some that I've seen:
- If it ain't broke... like you said.
- The bar is higher now and so is the learning curve. (I believe this was done purposely)
- Microsoft stuff isn't free.
- Adoption doubt. Some ISVs do not believe the adoption numbers that microsoft is reporting. (Balmer stated something like 43% of the dev community has adopted .net? really? show of hands who believes its that high?)
- THIS ONE IS CRITICAL --> VC's are not showing the love to .net based apps at nearly the same rate as open source apps.
My career has relied on microsoft technologies heavily over the last 10 years and I jumped right into .net while it was in beta but now I'm having a real problem with the adoption rate and the fact that the VCs are calling microsoft dead. So if your building stuff and looking for VC money you might want to really take a close look at whats being said/done in the VC community about .net while defining your goals.
Isn't software fun?
For my line of work i do alot of content managed systems for different sites, and my prefered language is asp.
if i did learn .NET do you think that it would benefit me greatly in this particular field?
Yes, Greatly.
I specialise in CMS, and without wanting to give my secrets away, re-usability is the key to effiency (and therefore profitability) with CMS systems. .Net makes writing reusable code much easier.
I cringe when I get a project to maintain/upgrade that was written in classic asp.
Once you learn it (the curve can be steep) the development time you save is amazing.
I just went to an MSDN demo for asp.net 2.0 and the guy created a product listing page with sorting and paging and a link to a detail page which allowed editing of the product - without a single line of code - not even a databind or sqladapter.
You will save many hours of development time once you get past the learning curve.