ASP vs ASP.NET

[Nathan Sokalski]

You may be right, I think I'll just have to wait and see (since I have to
take a course on ASP.NET in the Spring anyway). But one small comment on
what you said. You said:

more likely to get munged up by your FrontPage artist

I hate to tell you, but anyone who uses FrontPage shouldn't even be thinking
about making fancy web pages, FrontPage will screw up your code so badly
that it's going to be trash from the beginning anyway!

But thank you for your input, I with think about comparing those two things
while I am learning ASP.NET. I think I am just having trouble comparing them
since I have never seen or written a full ASP.NET page, which probably makes
it hard for me to see how good it is. I might also be scared about needing
to redo my website, since it is primarily ASP.

 

[Jeff Cochran]

I hate to tell you, but anyone who uses FrontPage shouldn't even be thinking
about making fancy web pages, FrontPage will screw up your code so badly
that it's going to be trash from the beginning anyway!

Don't use FrontPage much do you? Just because you don't doesn't mean
it has no purpose.

I might also be scared about needing
to redo my website, since it is primarily ASP.

You don't need to "redo" an ASP site just because you started with
..NET coding. They can coexist fine.

Jeff

 

[Guest]

I am struggling with the same question but perhaps for different reasons. I
have been building web applications for about 7 years with (mostly) script
and some COM. I am comfortable with OOP and have taken several
Microsoft-designed ASP.NET courses including their ASP to ASP.NET course
(which in my opinion is a waste of time for anyone with more that a passing
familiarity with ASP) and the ASP.NET Bootcamp (more useful but still didn't
solve my problem). Not to sound discouraging, but I am not sure that
appreciating how and why ASP.NET works will resolve your dilema.
Most of my development is Intranet (IE 5.5+) based and, admittedly, I
frequently build funtionality with ASP that is more appropriate in COM or
ASP.NET but my issue is that I now have a great deal of reusable code
(infrastructure, if you will) and complex techniques that allow me to be VERY
productive with ASP. ASP.NET promises great reduction in development time
but for me it may mean months of a gnificantly longer development cycles
because I hardly know how to begin to create in .NET the pages and modules
that are second nature to me in classic.
Transitioning content and code from ASP to ASP.NET is one thing but does
anyone have suggestions for speeding the transition of skill and productivity?

Michael Geist
MCSD (6)

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Hi Michael,

Your complaint (if I understand it correctly) is similar to the type of
complaints that surrounded OOP in general when it was first introduced. It
takes awhile to build a good library of reusable classes. There are several
upsides to this. First, once you have a good library of classes, you can
work very quickly in designing new applications. Second, Microsoft has
already built quite a few for you (in the CLR).

The biggest advantages of OOP over procedural programming come into play
with larger applications that may be extended or changed over time. OOP is
much better-organized, and encapsulation is a huge benefit. It is much
harder to write the kind of spaghetti code I've had to deal with over the
years with ASP. It is much easier to organize your code, and maintain it.
Rather than having libraries of functions, which is almost no organization,
you have libraries of classes. Each class, if well-designed is nicely
encapsulated, and modular. the larger and more complex an application is,
the greater will be the benefit.

As for speeding the transition of skill and productivity, well, practice
makes perfect.

If you stick with it long enough, you'll never want to look back.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Neither a follower
nor a lender be.

 

[Jim Carlock]

I knew this would come back to haunt me.

I was searching microsoft.com. I've had quite a few problems
with XP over the last few weeks, not so much XP problems,
but Microsoft changed some things about Permissions with SP2
it seems. And I wanted to get IIS 5.1 working once again.

I agree most of the time you will get redirected to the proper
page but for some reason, that particular day I was redirected
to a new page, which in turn redirected me back to the original
redirecting page. And there was enough of a time lapse there
that it didn't crash Mozilla nor FireFox. Maybe Microsoft's
website is more oriented for Internet Explorer than it is for
Mozilla or FireFox. I wish I had kept a copy of the problematic
link.

As far as DEAD LINKS go, just open any MSDN article
from December 2001 issues of MSDN. These links sometimes
redirect and sometimes give a default DEAD LINK page. So
in effect what's happening is Microsoft has a DEFAULT DEAD
LINK page that is displayed and you don't get the 404 Page
Not Found message and in effect... there are no dead links.

I disagree though. There ARE dead links... I could list a thousand
if I wanted to spend all night copying and pasting... straight from
a 2001 issue of MSDN...

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/htmlhelp/refov.asp

That particular link might have existed in 1998 or 1999. Time stands
still inside the articles they have written. Even though they break the
links, the articles STILL apply today just as they did in 1999, for
the most part.

Most of the tools I am working with are tools dated from 1998.


And I don't know what I was searching for but perhaps it was an
API name... InternetOpen or InternetConnect, because I was and
is having a problem with FTP through Internet Explorer and other
browsers and I'm getting a feeling that FTP through an application
is using InternetOpenURL. I was doing some searches for:
OnMouseOver and mouse_event as well... so no telling.

--
Jim Carlock
Post replies to newsgroup.

"Ray Costanzo [MVP]" <my first name at lane 34 dot commercial> wrote in
message I'm not sure what microsoft.com site you're visiting, but I have to say that
I've always been quite impressed the how rare it is that I come across dead
links on a site that literally has millions of files...

Ray at home

 

[Guest]

I found using libraries of functions made this a rather painless task with
little copy/paste required. Its how you build your basic infrastructure
thats important.

Cheers,
Quentin JS

 

[Nathan Sokalski]

You took the words right out of my mouth, I couldn't have said it better.
Maybe I stated my initial question unclearly, or maybe there's a lot of
biased responses, but I don't think anyone could have said my thoughts
better than you. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

I don't think there's a quick way on building transition from ASP to ASP.NET
because the two works on a very different way. I heard at a .NET conference
that the easy way to learn ASP/VB.NET is to forget about what you know on
core ASP/VB. I think I agree on that because learning on "what you think you
already knew" gets really frustrating when you can't get things done "youre
own way before".

I have been also programming in PHP before and I had fun on "in-line"
scripting, etc. But when I worked on ASP.NET, they take away that fun, but
the cool thing was, I didn't find myself re-writing (or copy-pasting) my
codes again and again on different objects on the page and/or on different
pages... that advantage alone makes me don't wanna go back, not to metion
the separation of design and code (codebehind) and other bunch stuff that you
can do and really had fun learning them and still learning them up to this
moment.