Well, with ASP and PHP, you can generate all the HTML manually, so you can control how closely to standards the HTML sticks, and which standards you will stick to (xhtml, html, etc.). Unfortunately, ASP.NET does not generate strict XHTML, though there are aftermarket solutions to fix this. I’ve not tried this personally, however.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the cross browser experience pretty good for XHTML (Strict) pages?

The biggest advantage ASP.NET has over classic ASP and PHP is the ideas of Code-Behind, where you have a clean separation of your code and the presentation code. You have to do quite a bit to approach this in PHP or ASP. Also, managed post backs / page states are quite nice.

I’m working on a PHP project after spending most of my time recently on ASP.NET, and while I used to think PHP was great, after working with C# and the .Net framework, PHP looks rather primitive. Not being able to overload functions, or having strongly typed variables, or any number of other things has been a pain. Not to mention that the Debugger for the .Net framework is a lot better than the debugger available for PHP (and cheaper, I think).

When it comes to the speed differences on your machine between Firefox and explorer – that is something I’ve never understood. This is not related to the server at all, right? It’s a rendering engine issue, right? The server serves up the pages at the same speed no matter what, right? Like I said, I’m not sure, and I’ve always wondered about this issue.

Josh

From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Brian Densmore
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:33 AM
To: kclug@kclug.org
Subject: RE: Test Hosting Recommendation

Ok. So how good are the pages on cross-browsers? I've seen a number of

issues with .net web pages rendering very differently on Explorer and

Opera or Firefox/Mozilla. I've also noticed some major speed differences

between Explorer and Firefox running on the same machine. I have no

problem supporting ASP as a server side page generator, as long as it

is usable by all browsers equally. For this reason I use PHP for now.

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles, Joshua Micah (UMKC-Student) [mailto:jmcqk6@umkc.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:16 AM
To: kclug@kclug.org
Subject: Test Hosting Reccomendation

Hello All.

This post is concerning ASP.NET hosting on Linux. There is a service out there:

http://www.monoforge.com/

I have a simple application running on my space. Here is an example of the power of this setup.

I developed my solution on Windows XP using Visual Studio 2003 .NET. I compiled it on windows using the Microsoft .NET C# compiler. Then I simply copied my files over using an FTP client and it ran, on Linux, without recompilation. It has a MySQL backend. When I first uploaded my app, the MySQL connector was not installed on the server machine. So I simply copied the dll into the execution directory ( bin/ ) and my custom app found it and used it automatically – problem solved.

The hosting is free for the moment, because this is currently a beta test. Once it goes live, beta testers will get some money off the final product. If nothing else, this is great for experimenting with.

Have fun!

Josh