If your business develops solutions in ASP, you could significantly cut your development time and improve the quality, security and performance of your applications by migrating to .NET. This article outlines some of the main benefits of this new technology.

Migrating from ASP to ASP.Net

ASP was released to work on NT Server 4.0 in 1996 as a scripting language used to deliver dynamic content to web users. The take up of ASP has been significant over the past 6 years with a large proportion of dynamic sites now being written in this way.

ASP is very popular with developers and it has undoubtedly brought many benefits to websites. However, it is now an older technology and is being replaced by ASP.Net. .Net has all the benefits of ASP, together with improved security, scalability, reliability, flexibility and interoperability of applications.

IT Companies developing solutions for business in ASP could reduce their development time and cost significantly by migrating their customers to .NET.

The Benefits for Business

Security: - Software companies who provide their own hosting have an obligation to their clients to provide sufficient security to ensure that the client's data is not compromised. Microsoft have received very little positive media coverage relating to the security of their systems. Sites hosted using ASP have had numerous security alerts over the past 6 years which have been corrected through the use of service packs. The .NET framework provides a new security approach which provides more clear and powerful control over application security. This reduces the risk for companies hosting web sites as they can feel more confident about the risk posed by security attacks and in some cases can protect companies if their terms and conditions do not cover them against the risk of security breaches.

Performance: - IT Hardware is expensive - a factor that has to be considered when hosting an application for a business. The .NET platform utilises the IT hardware more efficiently, thus significantly improving performance. This reduces the cost required to make a large application run acceptably and increases the number of applications that can be simultaneously hosted on a single machine.

Time: - The .NET framework provides a powerful collection of code libraries covering all the major areas of IT. By harnessing the power of these libraries, developers can write an application using far less lines of code. This reduces the time taken to complete solutions significantly. As well as this, the ability to re-use code in .NET is made easier, thus reducing development time even further.

Perceived Quality: - The .NET framework provides more flexibility than any other framework available. This gives developers more choice when creating a solution for a client and makes it simpler than ever before to add useful value-added features, currently only found on the highest quality sites. The improvement in quality that can be achieved using .NET means that a Software company's brand can be developed by guaranteeing higher quality software than its competitors.

These are just some of the many benefits that .Net can offer your business.

This article is copyright Fire Without Smoke Software 2003. If you wish to reproduce it please seek permission from www.fwoss.com or info@fwoss.com

Adrian is FWOSS' technical director and developing using the .NET platform is an area of his expertise.