8 Reasons to Stick with ASP 3.0

1. I've been using ASP for many years now; I can make it do anything I like. Over the years I have built a vast array of functions for all manner of operations from database access to formatting dates nicely. Nimble – that's me with ASP.
   
   
2. ASP.NET has many views of each page. There is the HTML view, the Source view, and the Code Behind view and switching between the three is sluggish in much the same way that wading waist high through treacle is a little slow going.
   
   
3. Sluggish is a word to describe the whole of the .NET development environment. Starting a new project? Go make a cup of coffee. Switching between tabs? 'Go large' with your coffee. Pressing F1 for help? Make your coffee a take-out and go and have a stroll in the park.
   
   
4. Regular ASP has the most lightweight development environment I have ever used - Notepad. Yep, that's all you need!
   
   • Installation time? - It's already installed
   • Start up time? - It's running in an instant
   • Configuration? - Not needed
   • Availability? - Any PC ever
     
     
5. ASP.NET has a tendency to auto-generate code. Is this a powerful and useful feature? Not in my books. Surely a serious developer can't depend on any code automatically generated by the overweight Behemoth that is .NET! Not only is the code auto-generated, but the client side code is generated on the fly, so you have no opportunity to modify or tweak what Bill's team thinks is good for you. If there was a smiley that denotes a "pah!" kind of spitting face I would insert it here.
   
   
6. Have you tried a quick fix on a regular ASP website? Dead easy. Edit the page as it sits on the web server and view your results instantly. Obviously on larger and more mission critical websites you would not do this, but on smaller websites why not? Have you tried a quick fix on a compiled ASP.NET website? It makes me pull this face :-( or this face :-o
   
   
7. Regular ASP hosting is still cheaper and more prevalent than ASP.NET hosting, and even the ASP.NET hosting is slow at moving to new versions. There are UNIX versions of the ASP compiler too so you don't even need a Windows hosting company.
   
   
8. Call me lazy, but I've always treated the uploading of a regular ASP website to a remote web server as making an off-site backup of the code. Should my laptop get dropped or lost I can download the website from the web server and continue development. Does this work with ASP.NET? Sadly not. The web server has some compiled code, making it very easy to loose source code.