10 Reasons to Develop in ASP

Low Cost of Ownership

This mainly applies to site owner, not directly to the developer. Nowadays it's easier to find an NT administrator and ASP developer than a UNIX guru. You may think that for you as a developer, this isn't a compelling reason to use ASP. However, low cost and abundance of support is just one more reason you can give to your employer/customer as to why they should do business with you. You can explain that they won't get left high and dry if one day you decide to part company, so while you're with them they will feel safe and satisfied.

Extensibility

There are virtually no limits to what can be done with ASP thanks to unlimited extensibility provided via COM components. This approach, in my opinion, is a key success factor of ASP. For example, there's no way to send email using standard ASP functions but there are lots of components (both free and commercial) enabling you to do this, as well as chosing the methods and features you want implemented. Recent introduction of Java Server Pages - an ASP style scripting language developed to work in conjunction with server-side Java, shows that the approach is recognized as powerful by one of the biggest Microsoft competitors, Sun Microsystems.

Hosting

Hosting companies widely support ASP. A search on HostIndex returned 889 matches for hosting companies supporting ASP with hosting prices starting below $10. This is quite enough to find the host that meets all your needs for a reasonable price and you will be able to switch hosting companies easily if your current doesn't satisfy you.

Tools

Microsoft has two tools supporting ASP: their most popular WYSIWYG editor - FrontPage (though I would not personally recommend it for ASP editing) and Visual InterDev. Other vendors have also implemented ASP support into their products, including the popular HTML coding package HomeSite from Allaire. There's also scheduled support for ASP in upcoming versions of other widely-used code based editors, such as HotDog Pro from Sausage Software.

You Can Get a Good Job

A search for ASP on high tech job search engine dice.com returned more than 10000 matches with average salary around $70K. I think it will be hard for you to chose the best from such a quantity, but very simple to find good one.

There are of course more reasons to develop in ASP, but I hope these ten were enough to convince you that developing in ASP can make your life happier and get you to the next level of your career.

For additional information on ASP, take a look at:

• The ABC's of Active Server Pages:
  msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/server/asp/ASPover.asp

• ASP Overview:
  www.wdvl.com/Software/Tools/ASP.html

• General ASP resource sites:
  www.aspwatch.com/
  www.asptoday.com/

About the author:

Alan Mendelevich is Bachelor of Computer Science and Microsoft Certified Professional in the fields of IIS and MS SQL Server. He lives in Lithuania, and currently spends most of his time working on ArticleCentral.com - The Content Directory for Web Professionals (www.articlecentral.com/). He is also Webmaster at MEGOPhotos (www.megopolis.com/photos/). In his free time, he enjoys playing with his little daughter Daniela.

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This article originally appeared in the December 16, 1999 edition of the WebReference Update Newsletter.