Need for a New Version

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Migrating to .NET: A Pragmatic Path to Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, and ASP.NET
By Dhananjay  Katre, Prashant  Halari, Narayana  Rao  Surapaneni, Manu  Gupta, Meghana  Deshpande

Table of Contents
Chapter 5.   Migration Approach for ASP to ASP.NET


Because ASP is being used extensively for Web development, the need for a newer version may be questioned. Although designed to have a lot of scope and flexibility, ASP sometimes fails to live up to the expectations of an independent and robust Web technology. Any further development in ASP is limited by the following factors.

Use of Scripting Languages

ASP relies largely on scripting languages such as VBScript and JScript. One disadvantage with using scripting languages is that the page is interpreted each time it is accessed. Also, scripting languages are not strongly typed. This invariably leads to performance and scalability issues.

Inline Code

The biggest advantage of ASP is that code can be built into the Web page, but this has led to unforeseen problems. Mixing of code with HTML content, as shown in the following, creates code that can be difficult to maintain and can lead to larger source files. Also, it may cause serious performance issues.

 graphics/icon01.gif <TABLE border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" _     width="100%" >     <%IF CurrentSession="" THEN %>        <TR align = middle>           <TD>               <%                  Response.Write "Data Entry not permitted."                  Response.End               %>            </TD>        </TR>       <%END IF%>     </TABLE> 

Browser Dependency

Page layout for ASP pages usually needs to be formatted according to the browser presenting the pages, which often results in writing a different set of code for each browser. This leads to a lot of rework and also introduces redundancy in code.

Additionally, Web sites can now be accessed from mobile devices. This requires the code to be smart enough to detect the device and render the output accordingly , which means more rework for developers.

Deployment of COM Components

Even though deployment of the Web application was never an issue, maintaining COM components in an application poses a challenge to developers. If any of the components being used in the ASP Web application are changed, the IIS Web server needs to be restarted before the changes can take effect, which entails stopping production site servers.

Debugging ASP Applications

ASP does not provide a support tool to aid debugging. Debugging can be done with the external help of the Microsoft Script Debugger or Visual Interdev. The use of Response.Write statements for debugging is a very common technique. But this introduces a lot of unwanted code, which has to be cleaned up at a later stage.

ASP.NET resolves most of the preceding problems and also offers a host of possibilities for a complete application development framework. The core benefits of ASP.NET are

  1. Code separation, separating business logic from presentation logic.

  2. Ease of deployment; no server restarts are required for implementing changes in COM.

  3. Support across browsers and devices.

  4. Better security of Web applications.

  5. Support new application models such as Web services.

  6. Improved state management.

Most of the benefits stem from the fact that ASP.NET is built on the .NET Framework, the heart of which is the CLR. The key features of ASP.NET are discussed in the following sections.


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Migrating to. NET. A Pragmatic Path to Visual Basic. NET, Visual C++. NET, and ASP. NET
Migrating to. NET. A Pragmatic Path to Visual Basic. NET, Visual C++. NET, and ASP. NET
ISBN: 131009621
EAN: N/A
Year: 2001
Pages: 149

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