With some components, such as the ADO component, a default non-indexed property could be referred by simply referring to the object itself. This allowed for a shortcut in programming. However, in this more structured environment, this is no longer allowed. When an object is referred to the property must be called.

ASP:

<%
Connection = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
Connection .Open("MyDatabase")
RS = Connection .Execute("Select * from Operations")
Response.Write(RS("ID"))
%>

<%
Connection = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
Connection .Open("MyDatabase")
RS = Connection .Execute("Select * from Operations")
Response.Write(RS("ID").Value)
%>

In the above ASP.net example the "Value" property must be explicitly indicated or it would not recognize what value to write to the screen and would generate an error.

Oops!

When an ASP.net page is run, if you are on the machine that the code is being executed on, or you have a web.config file in the root directory of the website configured properly, error messages that appear are a little more intuitive than the current error messages. In ASP error messages can be somewhat vague, but with ASP.net, the specific line of code that is causing the error is displayed with a little better description. This allows for an easier debugging time than before.

Bi-lingual I am not

One large difference between ASP and ASP.net is ASP.net does not contain the capability to have multiple languages on a single page. This means you can not switch between VBScript to JScript and then back again. You still can have different languages on different pages within the same application, however.

I have a new extension, please forward all my calls

The one last final and perhaps most minute change is ASP.net pages require a different extension. When a page is created in ASP.net it requires an .aspx extension, which you may notice this web page has as well. When a page has this extension IIS knows to treat it as an ASP.net page instead of an older ASP page.

Conclusion

As you can see there are some changes to ASP, but with a little education you can easily move into the realm of ASP.net. I know a large concern for me is whether all the old ASP programming will need to be changed. Eventually, perhaps, but for now the old asp.dll is still available and has not been altered by these new improvements. Instead, Microsoft has put these changes into other libraries. All the old code you know and love will still run under ASP, but if you want to change to ASP.net there will be some time involved. For now, I think I will stick to updating my old code in ASP and writing new code in ASP.net.

If you would like to download the ASP.net 1.0 framework visit the ASP.net Microsoft Site at http://www.asp.net/download.aspx.

Previous