Active Server Pages/Differences between ASP 3.0 and ASP.NET

The most important difference between ASP and ASP.Net is that ASP uses interpreted VBScript or JScript, and ASP.net uses any .Net language (including VB.Net, C#, J#, etc.) compiled.

ASP 3.0 left all its code in the front of the application. There was no way for a programmer to "hide" the sensitive code which he or she may not want anybody to see. The fact that the code was interpreted also slowed performance. ASP.NET allows the programmer to create dynamic link libraries containing the sensitive code. This may be a disadvantage from an open-source perspective but compiling code into dll's greatly improves performance.

ASP.NET is firmly rooted in XML. Customarily, the dlls that ASP.NET creates start out as namespaces. All of the classes in the namespaces are then compiled into a single dll binary.


 * 1) ASP is mostly written using VB Script and HTML intermixed. Presentation and business logic is intermixed while ASP.NET can be written in several .NET compliant languages such as C# or VB.NET.
 * 2) ASP has maximum of 4 built in classes like Request, Response, Session and Application whereas ASP.NET using .NET framework classes which has more than 2000 built-in classes.
 * 3) ASP does not have any server based components whereas ASP.NET offers several server based components like Button, TextBox etc. and event driven processing can be done at server.
 * 4) ASP doesn't support Page level transactions whereas ASP.NET supports Page level transactions.
 * 5) ASP.NET offers web development for mobile devices which alters the content type (wml or chtml etc.) based on the device.
 * 6) ASP.NET allows separation of business and presentation logic because the code need not be included directly in the *.aspx page.
 * 7) ASP.NET uses languages which are fully object oriented languages like C# and also supports cross language support.
 * 8) ASP.NET offers support for Web Services and rich data structures like DataSet which allows disconnected data processing.