Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

ASP or C# ?

(1/2) > >>

kyrathaba:
I'm certain several of you can answer this question for me:

I've mostly been using Visual C# 2005 Express, but as you know there are several Express IDEs available.  I also have the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express edition.  I understand that equipped with it and a knowledge of ASP, one can code some pretty nifty web applications/services.  My question is this:  isn't finding webhosting with ASP access generally a fee-for-service type thing?  In other words, would I, as a novice programmer mainly learning to program for the fun of it, be able to do much with ASP without having a pay-account on a server somewhere?  I know one can use C# to do lots of stuff with the web/internet, and that's what I've been using all along, but I wondered if spending time and effort with Visual WebDev would be worth it for me personally, as someone with no interest in spending any money ;>

Veign:
ASP or ASP.NET (huge difference)...

kyrathaba:
I think the Web Developer Express uses ASP.NET (someone correct me if I'm mistaken).  Regardless, it is my (limited) understanding that ASP is a technology for the web.  I just want to know how realistic it would be for me to invest time and energy becoming familiar with it if its use typically is a commercial thing or at the very least requires a paid hosting account.

mouser:
There are people who know about ASP and could offer you good advice.

I don't know anything about ASP so take this with a grain of salt, but unless I was working on some very specific business application that had a real good reason to be using ASP, I would much rather work with a platform neutral technology for web services, like PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc.  Just my 2 cents and I look forward to hearing from any ASP people.

mwb1100:
You don't need to have a hosted web server to do ASP.NET work - the IIS webserver on WinXP (or Win2000?) will host ASP.NET applications just fine.  I believe that there are other web servers that will host ASP.NET, too, but I've never used them and I'm not sure what their limitations might be.

Because of this, to get started learning to program ASP.NET, there's no additional cost above your development machine.

So the question is really about who do you want to be able to access your application?  If it's just you (or others on your local network), then you don't need 3rd party hosting.  If you want the whole world to access your application then you have 3 options:

1) 3rd party ASP.NET hosting
2) put your machine on the Internet as a web server (make sure you have your security configured properly!)
3) have the installer or install instructions for your application enable (or install) an appropriate web server on the user's machine (this can be tricky)

All of this pretty much applies to the web technologies that Mouser mentioned, too (PHP, etc.)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page