ASP.NET is the new file extension: ASP.NET pages use .aspx, as opposed to the .asp extension used with ASP. Additionally, when an ASP.NET page is requested, IIS hands off the request to the aspnet_wp.exe process; ASP uses asp.dll.
ASP and ASP.NET can both be used on the same Web server. That is, a Web site or Web application within a site can contain both ASP.NET pages and ASP pages. Because both ASP and ASP.NET pages can be accessed from the same Web server, you are not required to port your existing ASP pages over to ASP.NET-compatible pages. However, there are many advantages to porting your application from ASP to ASP.NET.
Some of the biggest advantages include:
Increased performance: Microsoft tests have shown that ASP.NET applications can handle two to three times the requests per second as classic ASP applications.
Increased stability: Processes are closely monitored and managed by the ASP.NET run time, so that if one misbehaves, a new process can be created in its place, which helps keep your application constantly available to handle requests.
Increased developer productivity: New features like server controls and event handling in ASP.NET help developers build applications more rapidly and in fewer lines of code. It is also easier than ever to separate code from HTML content.
Unfortunately, porting existing ASP pages to ASP.NET pages is almost never as easy as simply renaming the file extension from .asp to .aspx because, among other factors, there are significant differences between Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) and Visual Basic .NET. The good news is that most of the needed changes are syntactical and automatic. Visual Basic .NET code that uses COM components can virtually be left as is; C# code, however, requires a bit of extra code to work with COM components, which is beyond the scope of this document.
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