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Leverage ASP.NET in Your Enterprise
Give your IT Web development organization a boost by guiding it to ASP.NET.
by Barry Bloom
For this solution: ASP.NET, .NET Framework
Moving your organization to ASP.NET offers several advantages over the traditional Active Server Pages (ASP)/Visual Basic 6 platform. ASP.NET introduces an integrated development environment (IDE), a single development library for all types of applications, and a true object-oriented approach to Web application development. In this column, I'll explain how you can apply ASP.NET to your organization for maximum results.
Understanding the pitfalls of ASP/VB6 development helps you see the benefits of ASP.NET development. First, although ASP and VB6 work together, they aren't integrated in the development project sense. Visual InterDev—the environment many developers use to write ASP code—and VB6 are both in the Visual Studio 6 box, but the integration stops there. You have to create a separate project from your Visual InterDev Web project if you want to create a VB component for your ASP Web site. You also must version the projects separately. It takes two different skill sets to get the job done; developers aren't presented with a clean, single interface for creating ASP/VB6 applications in VS6. VS.NET eliminates these problems because it has only one interface.
This single interface can mean increased productivity for your developers and a true single-project feel for an ASP.NET application. When porting a project from ASP/VB6 to ASP.NET, I went from more than 30 unique VB6 component projects and three Visual InterDev projects to one VS.NET solution that contained one class library project and one ASP.NET Web application project. Instead of opening multiple IDEs (what an oxymoron), developers can open a single IDE and do all their work from a clean, consistent interface.
Don't underestimate the benefits of the single interface. Along with the obvious training implications (developers only need to learn one interface now), this environment offers some intangible benefits. Your developers might be less intimidated by their own projects and more flexible because they no longer have to learn so many different interfaces to make code changes. ASP.NET and VS.NET enable you to simplify your Web development project structure and increase your organization's overall productivity when creating dynamic Web sites (see the sidebar, "Understand the ASP.NET Development Environment").
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