Posted: January/21/2007 at 12:58pm | IP Logged

If if was my project I would use classic ASP, but ultimately it depends on you.

Posted: July/18/2007 at 5:03pm | IP Logged

I am Proficient Coldfusion programmer, but I also worked in PHP for 4 years, and ASP classic.  Coldfusion is my preferred language.

My company, who has most of their existing programs coded in ASP classic, has decided to transition to DOT.NET.  I was all for until I started to learn .NET, and then try to build something in .NET.

It is a difficult world for a developer with a non-traditional background to adapt to the .NET world.  It really makes you think about developing differently.  You really have to put effort into planning, and more planning.

I tried to change things up the old way, making changes to pages, or removing and rebuilding a master page and the whole application caves in. 

I find myself rebuilding something 50 times in a new solution just to get it to work.

So then I am thinking cost.  We have to find a guy that knows .NET to train us and get us moving and help us crank out an application or two.

The whole time I am spinning in my brain as I am thinking of the cost.  Cost in time, cost for a proficient developer, which can easily breach $100 grand.

And then I see your post.

So there it is.

My two cents.

Posted: July/18/2007 at 5:37pm | IP Logged

Hi Guys,

I posted to this thread ages ago and since then my opinion has not really changed. We just migrated our main application to .net and it has been quite a challenge. We did get some benefits but overall the application runs at about the same speed (we did have very streamlined asp code using arrays everywhere based on single database calls) and frankly I wonder was it worth the effort? The downside is similar to ftudor says.

1. Finding developers who can really code has been hard. All of them seem to be able to use Visual Studio and drag tables to build simple datagrids ala Microsoft demo stuff but once you get into the meat and start building real business logic we see some really strange stuff.

2. The learning curve for .net is STEEP despite what .net pros would say. It almost seems like coming from classic ASP is a disadvantage to learning.

3. Deploying changes means having the whole development library available and visual studio. With ASP I can jump on to any site and do snappy fixes from any internet cafe on the planet.

The customers never pick the difference between a url with .asp or .aspx anyway. The only time we get flack from anyone is some snobbery from hardened .net guys. Would be interesting seeing a code-off between good ASP/Rad tools and .net using visual studio. I am pretty sure I know what would win.

The only area we have found where .net wins hands down is web services. The ability to drag a web service reference into a project and have all the datasets and soap stuff handled is very cool.

Perhaps long term we will see some upside and if I start to switch camps I will post back here but at the moment, we can code and  deploy much faster and cheaper using ASP and dont see any big performance leaps if we migrate to .net.  Will be interesting to see how things pan out now we must use .net for all development.

Perhaps we are lucky and have quite well coded ASP. Crappy ASP code migrated to .net does force the use of datareaders etc so maybe that is where the performance comes from?

Regards

David