Summary

There's no denying that .NET is an exceptional platform for application development. Throughout this book you've seen the great features ASP.NET provides for writing first-class applications, and how those applications will have less code, be more reusable, and provide easier maintenance. It would have been easy for Microsoft to leave it there, and just provide a great new platform, but the reality of life means that this platform has to interoperate with existing applications. There's a huge investment, not only in ASP, but also in Visual Basic and COM, and this cannot be thrown away.

So, Microsoft has provided a way to integrate that existing investment with new development on the .NET platform. In this chapter we've examined the differences between ASP and ASP.NET, and how moving from VBScript to Visual Basic .NET can be achieved with the least pain. We've also examined how to allow .NET to leverage existing COM infrastructures , as well as showing how COM can use .NET. So, if the features of .NET weren't enough to persuade you that this is a great platform, maybe the ability to run alongside existing applications will tip the balance.