Asp & asp.net

What's the difference?

[HyperGeek]

All of my servers have upgraded to ASP.NET.

I have been writing ASP pages using VBScript for about a year and a half now and I'm always looking for more bells and whistles to play with.

What do I have to gain by learning ASP.NET and is there *really* that big of a difference this early in the game?

What is the biggest change from ASP to ASP.NET?

[korkus2000]

for one you name your pages aspx so iis doesn't confuse classic from .net. I think one of the biggest changes is the just in time compile. It makes your apps run fast. Its also quicker to develop with.

you also get a whole bunch of pre written classes that will help you develop. Microsoft has classes that do a lot of the stuff that was a big pain in the past with asp.

[Xoc]

In ASP.NET, you use full Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) or C# (or any other .NET language) to code the page. It's fully compiled. You have full access to the .NET Framework. It uses a different model for how the code interacts with the page than ASP.

The two can co-exist on the same web site. Anything with the .asp extension uses classic ASP. Anything with the .aspx extension uses ASP.NET. The only issue is that the old and new can't share Session information since they use entirely different models for how they store it. The ASP doesn't know anything about the ASPX pages and vice versa.

[HyperGeek]

So basically, all of the VBScript I know is useless when applied (in theory) to ASP.NET?

Do I have to re-learn an entire language in order to switch over, or can I simply take an .ASP page and change it to an .ASPX page and work from there using my old code as a platform for the new stuff?

[Xoc]

Yes and no. Visual Basic .NET is similar to VBScript in a lot of ways. So that part is leveraged. But VB.NET is much more powerful.

But I'd leave your current pages as ASP and code new pages as ASPX. I don't see the point of starting over unless you need your site to be consistent across the board. You are learning new stuff, so there is a learning curve, but Visual Studio .NET takes a lot of the grunge out of it.

[andrey_sea]

If you have some pages that run really slow, you may consider changing them to ASP.NET pages the difference is dramatic in some instances...

If you know VBScript you know a lot of VB.NET syntax. If you know Java, that will really help with C# or VB.NET as they are really similar... I am constantly amazed how much C# borrows from Java.