Comparing and Differentiating Asp and Asp.Net

In December 1996, Active Server Pages (ASP) was released by Microsoft as a server-side scripting engine for building dynamic and interactive web pages. In January 2002, Microsoft released version 1.0 of ASP.NET, along with .NET framework 1.0. Despite being promoted as the successor to ASP, ASP.NET was designed by Microsoft as an advanced server-side web application development framework for creating websites, internet applications, and web services. Further, Microsoft has been updating ASP.NET at regular intervals to make it complement the latest trends in web development. So there are several advanced features and functionalities that make ASP.NET completely different from, and far superior than classis ASP.

Major Differences between Classic ASP and ASP.NET

Platform Support: Microsoft introduced ASP on its own server, i.e., Internet Information Server (IIS). So the server side scripting technology was available only for Windows platform. ASP.NET was also released initially as part of the .NET Framework. So the web application development framework was running on platforms that support the .NET framework. But in 2014, Microsoft made ASP.NET available for Linux and Mac OS X, in addition to Windows. The web programmers can use the latest version of ASP.NET as a cross-platform and open source web development framework.

Language Supports: While using ASP, the programmers have option to write code in any of the two interpreted language, i.e., JScript or VBScript, The VBScript was the default scripting language for ASP, whereas JScript was the Microsoft’s version of JavaScript. On the other hand, the ASP.NET programmers have option to choose from a wide range of programming languages supported by the .NET framework, including C#, J#, and VB.NET.

Process Isolation: The ASP applications run under the inetinfo.exe process space of IIS. Thus, their performance will be impacted when IIS is restarted or stopped. On the other hand, ASP.NET uses a different worker process, i.e., aspnet_wp.exe, which is completely distinct from inetinfo.exe. Therefore, the process isolation keeps the performance of ASP.NET independent of other IIS working processes.

Server Based Controls: Unlike ASP, ASP.NET comes with a variety of server based components and controls. These server based components make it easier for web programmers to accomplish event driven processing at the server, and avoid writing lengthy code. For instance, ASP.NET developers have option to choose from three types of button controls, i.e., buttons, link buttons and image buttons. Likewise, they can also use basic ASP.NET controls like text, label, checkbox, radio button, and several types of list controls.

Used Technologies: ASP and ASP.NET also vary from each other due to technologies used by them. For instance, ASP.NET is designed with built-in support for XML, whereas ASP does not support XML by default. Likewise, ASP.NET uses ADO.NET to work with databases, but ASP used ADO for similar purposes. Also, ASP pages can have HTML and coding logic mixed. But ASP.NET uses code-behind files to keep the HTML and coding parts separate. The code-behind files further help programmers in hiding both code and sensitive information from end users.

Debugging Options: The interpreted model of classic ASP makes debugging both restricted and difficult. But ASP.NET is designed with advanced debugging features. The ASP.NET programmers also have option to use several debugging tools. As the page errors are generated as compiled errors, they can be easily identified at the time of compilation and much before the runtime. As both C# and VB.NET are strongly typed programming languages, it also becomes easier for developers to debug their code.

Quality and Performance of Code: As noted earlier, in ASP, the code is executed through an interpreter like VBScript or JScript. So each time an ASP page is requested, its text has to be processed linearly. Further, the programmers have to write lengthy blocks of server side code to replace the static HTML elements. But the ASP.NET pages can be easily compiled into .NET classes. The .NET classes, which are housed within assemblies, also include both static HTML and server-side script. So the ASP.NET page is compiled when it is being accesses for the first time. The pages will be rendered on subsequent requests through compiled code execution. So the speed and performance of ASP.NET pages is much better than that of ASP pages.

In late 2014, Microsoft completely revamped ASP.NET. In addition to making it open source, Microsoft also made ASP.NET available for non-Windows platforms like Linux and Mac OS X. ASP.NET 5 comes with a set of innovative features including a cross-platform runtime, cloud-ready environment configuration, and a modular HTTP request pipeline. ASP.NET 5 further includes a unified framework called MVC6 that includes Web Pages, MVC and Web API. If you are planning to hire asp .net development companies, you must evaluate them to see if they are sufficiently agile or not!

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