DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ASP AND ASP.NET

ASP.NET has been greatly improved over the ASP technology in .Net. Some of the important features of ASP.NET and the improvements over the classical ASP technology include:

• ASP.NET is completely compiled code on the server side as opposed to interpreted code in the traditional ASP technology. This helps improves the performance of the web site greatly.
• ASP.NET is completely object-oriented as the entire code is written in one of the .Net languages (C# being the most common and most powerful). Traditional ASP used the ActiveX/COM technology to create tiered architectures and give the server-side the code somewhat of an object-oriented feel. Traditional ASP also used ActiveX/COM components to accomplish sophisticated tasks such as sockets, sending emails, uploading files to the server etc.. ASP.NET eliminates the need to use ActiveX/COM components as the entire framework class library is available to accomplish any sophisticated task.
• ASP.NET provides a clean separation between the GUI and the server-side code. Each web page typically has two parts to it: a .aspx file containing the HTML presentation, and a code behind file (with .cs or .vb extension) containing the related server-side code. Thus by default, the ASP.NET provides a 2-Tier architecture which can be easily implemented as a multi-tier design as the complexity of the web application increases.
• ASP.NET further improves the performance by providing powerful server-side caching of the executed code for a faster response to the client.
• The associated ADO.NET technology for dealing with databases also has smart caching of records available in the form of the dataset for a very high performance data driven web application.
• ASP.NET is backwards compatible with the classical ASP technology.
• ASP.NET has a much easier deployment of web applications. Simply copy the web application directory to a target machine and set up the appropriate virtual directory to run the application.
• ASP.NET can use the ActiveX/COM components if needed through the RCW (Runtime Class Wrapper) feature of .Net. Although all new development in ASP.NET can be accomplished without the ActiveX/COM components.
• For creating scalable, tiered architectures, ASP.NET still uses the COM+ technology. However, the COM+ programming is made much simpler by the use of special attributes that can be specified for the .Net classes that will be converted to COM+ components.
• ASP.NET provides excellent client-side data validation in the form of specialized validators. These validators generate the appropriate client-side Javascript code for data validation on the client side. Thus the need to program in Javascript directly on the client-side is greatly reduced.
• ASP.NET provides a powerful server-side event driven model for web application development where different HTML elements (server controls) on the client-side trigger events on the server-side (the associated code behind file for the aspx file contains the event handlers for these events).
• ASP.NET provides a very easy way to maintain the state of client-side elements once a server-side event is triggered by one of these elements and the form is submitted to the server.
• ASP.NET provides an AutoPostBack property for server-side controls so that if anything is changed in the control, the data is posted to the web server. For example, if a checkbox is checked or unchecked, the server-side event handler can be triggered if its AutoPostBack property is set to true.
• Although Visual Studio.Net is not required for developing ASP.NET applications, it makes the web application development much easier by providing an array of server-side controls, their visual placement and writing of the skeleton code for the event handlers for these.
• ASP.NET and Visual Studio.NET provide powerful support for creating web services and web services based distributed applications.