Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).
Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functionality useful for creating dynamic web pages. In ASP 3.0 there are six such built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page. Application Test Center is also available for load testing.
Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but any other Active Scripting engine can be selected instead by using the @Language directive. JScript (Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that is usually available. PerlScript (Perl) and others are available as third-party installable Active Scripting engines.
ASP.NET is a set of web development technologies marketed by Microsoft. Programmers can use it to build dynamic web sites, web applications and XML web services. It is part of Microsoft's .NET platform and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.
Even though ASP.NET takes its name from Microsoft's old web development technology, ASP, the two differ significantly. Microsoft has completely rebuilt ASP.NET, based on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) shared by all Microsoft .NET applications. Programmers can write ASP.NET code using any of the different programming languages supported by the .NET framework, usually (proprietary) Visual Basic.NET, JScript .NET, or (standardized) C#, but also including open-source languages such as Perl and Python. ASP.NET is faster because the entire web site is precompiled to one or a few DLL files on a web server and the web site runs faster compared to the previous scripting technology.
