My Progress With ASP.NET

It's not that it is intrinsically difficult, I think I was just trying to run before I could walk. I've just spent three days last week taking an existing partly built website in PHP and rewriting it to use ASP.NET/C#. The PHP website used a very nice free template called Multiflex-3. This was written in html and css and I'd used all the PHP tricks I knew so that most of each web page was done with just a few lines of code and a few include files. That's the php way. But I'd been somewhat dissatisfied with PHP over the years and so was determined to make the break and jump to ASP.NET. I even rented cheap ASP.NET 3.5 hosting and registered a domain for it. I started on Tuesday this week and by Thursday I had a lookalike website running (though with most things unimplemented).

With ASP.NET, there are a couple of ways of doing things to simplify life; Master Pages and Themes. You create a Master Page with site logo, menus etc and then each page on the site uses the Master page and you add code to customize it. It's a bit like a master slide in Power Point. Themes let you style all the controls as well as the sites look and feel. Melding them was fun but a bit time consuming but I've now done it with both 2 column and 3 column pages. The frontpage now looks identical to the PHP one including drop down menus. That's to be expected as both these technologies ASP.NET and PHP are both server side and serve up html and css etc but it was still nice to see it! Now of course comes the rest of the hard work; databases, logins, cookies etc. My main reason for switching is that for a sophisticated web application I think C# outguns php.

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