In 1996 I was programming web applications using the old HTX/IDC method. Hopefully, not too many people remember this type of programming. It was bulky and did not have anything to offer outside database connectivity. ASP was a big improvement over this method and I quickly moved to it. I do not see ASP to ASP.net as quite a big jump as HTX/IDC to ASP, but it still requires a bit of education. ASP.net is the next rendition of ASP with a little bit of a twist and in this document we will touch upon some of the differences between ASP and ASP.net.

ASP is no longer an interpreted language, rather it is now a compiled language. What does that mean? It means that when a page is called in ASP the script is read and executed by a command line interpreter one line at a time. With ASP.net the pages are compiled common language code executing on the server. This allows for advantages and forces some changes in the traditional ASP programming.

Pros and Cons

This new type of ASP coding allows for added performance benefit. This type of functionality is seen with COM Objects. Since COM Objects are pre-compiled they did not need to be interpreted every time the script was executed on the server. They are already in machine code and ready to go and thus gives any code in COM Objects a performance boost. This also added a security benefit to COM Objects. Since ASP scripts were always interpreted the code needed to be in the web pages themselves. Since COM Objects are pre-compiled the source code is much harder to hack and thus is not as susceptible to security breaches. ASP.net, being compiled has similar increased the security in the new framework.

Another added benefit of ASP.net is its additional features that are included in the package. The functionality of these features can created in COM Objects, and some have been in the past. They have simply been included as part of the base package.

Lastly, ASP.net adds another language to the fold, C#, known as C sharp. All the following examples will use VBScript, but I encourage a look at this new language.

Now For the specific differences.

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