Migrating ASP Pages to ASP.NET

ASP.NET offers significant improvements over ASP in the areas of performance, state management, scalability, configuration, deployment, security, output cache control, Web farm support, and XML Web service infrastructure.

If you have ASP development skills, the new ASP.NET programming model will seem very familiar to you. However, the ASP object model has undergone significant changes to make it more structured and object-oriented, so most existing ASP pages will have to be modified to some extent in order to run under ASP.NET. Major changes to Visual Basic .NET as well mean that existing ASP pages written with Visual Basic Scripting Edition typically will not port directly to ASP.NET. In most cases, though, the necessary changes will involve only a few lines of code.

Most developers will probably choose to rewrite existing ASP applications to gain the performance, readability, and maintainability improvements of the new development environment. But, because a Web application can contain both ASP and ASP.NET pages, the conversion does not necessarily have to be carried out on all pieces of the entire Web application at once.

ASP and ASP.NET can run side by side on an Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server without interference; there is no chance of corrupting an existing ASP application simply by installing ASP.NET. Only files with an .aspx file name extension are processed by ASP.NET; files with an .asp file name extension will continue to be processed by the existing, unchanged ASP engine. You should note, however, that session state and application state are not shared between ASP and ASP.NET pages.

In This Section

• Structural Compatibility
  Presents the differences in page layout and coding style between ASP and ASP.NET.
• ASP.NET Security
  Provides a brief discussion of ASP.NET security.
• Visual Basic Language Changes
  Presents the major differences between VBScript and Visual Basic .NET.
• COM Component Compatibility
  Describes how to use COM components in ASP.NET applications.
• ASP.NET Data Access
  Describes how to convert existing ASP applications from ADO to ADO.NET.
• Optimizing Performance in ASP.NET
  Describes potential performance issues to consider when migrating ASP applications to ASP.NET.

Related Sections

• Accessing Data with ASP.NET
  Describes how to bind data from SQL Server to Web Forms controls.
• ASP.NET Configuration
  Describes the ASP.NET configuration system.
• Creating ASP.NET Web Applications
  Explains how to create Web applications using ASP.NET.