What are ASP and ASP.NET?
Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting technology developed by Microsoft that supplies dynamic and interactive functionality to Web pages. ASP allows you to embed controls from different languages into a single page. ASP offers native support for Visual Basic (VB) scripts and JScript (Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript). ASP offers itself as a desirable alternative to PHP or CGI scripts when hosted in a Windows server environment.
ASP.NET is the second generation of ASP and extends the technology to include the Microsoft .NET platform. ASP.NET offers support for more than 25 .NET languages, including native support for VB.NET, C#, and JScript.NET. Unlike traditional ASP, ASP.NET compiles code to offer a significant increase in performance. However, developers are not required to explicitly compile the code; ASP.NET examines each page when it is requested and dynamically compiles any files that have changed since they were last accessed.
For further information regarding ASP and ASP.NET, visit any of the following:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/default.asp?contentid=28000522