The future for Classic ASP? [ASP was replaced in 2002 by ASP.NET]

I hate it when people state that ASP Classic is a dying bread, and this is true for Microsoft
BUT, not for companies that still use it, that have absolutely no plans on removing the technology from their sites. And for the new servers, They will continue to support ASP Classic for what I read, as there is way too many companies out there that still use the aged technology, there for Microsoft will continue to have the support within their platform, if they give up on ASP Classic within their servers for future release, then they will loose a lot of money as there are still 1,000's of sites that still use the Classic ASP Technology.

It is like Windows XP dying out, but people will continue to use it, regardless of Microsoft's plans for not supporting it in the future. Not everyone wants to move to something new that they do not like nor want to touch (Referring to Vista and Windows 7,,, I happen to like Windows 7, but I continue to use XPMCE, as it works for what I need it to, and I have not had the time to learn the new Win7 design yet)

So.
Classic ASP will continue to be supported for the last I heard, for the next 10+ years of Microsoft Development.
If ASP Classic Vunerable to attacks and so forth? yes, if your coding is not professionally done and you do not protect your code. Same thing goes for: ASP.net and PHP, you have to protect yourself, or you will become a victim.

AS for everything going over to php extentions.
How cares, as long as you have the knowledge and development skills to do everything yourself, then you do not need to rely on some company to make stuff for you to use. (Referring to Dreamweaver Extensions, learn how to code yourself and leave all that crap behind you)

ASP Classic, I love it and do not plan on leaving it behing.
All my sites are done in ASP Classic, and I use ASP.NET only when I need to add something in.
As ASP.NET makes it easy to accomplish such things as Upload and Thumbnails.

Good Luck
Carrzkiss

Generally, because we so often say "programming in ASP", many people think that ASP is a programming language. This also happens with .NET, despite all the marketing and community effort to clarify the matter, there are still a lot of people who don't clearly understand the difference between a framework and a programming language. These people are programmers and non-programmers. Of course we accept the fact that non-programmers do not know this difference, but it's unacceptable that programmers can't distinguish one from the other. Microsoft did a good job in advertising .NET so that programmers are sufficiently well informed on the matter (it's quite normal to see people correcting others in forums). However, in the Classic ASP area, it's very common, for example, to find analysis such as "PHP vs. ASP" and no one claiming about it. The height of absurdity is when people compare the syntax of PHP with the syntax of ASP/VBScript and judge PHP as superior to ASP, just because the PHP is a member of the C/C ++ family, which has a broad base of programmers that, supposedly, would learn the language faster, because of the similarity of the syntax. This is due to the fact that the authors are required to choose a language to be able to say something about ASP. I contribute, in some way, to this confusion, since I wrote the specification of the "ASP language" in the GTKSourceView-2.0 using only the information of ASP/ VBScript. That's right, every new geek that opens a program based on GTKSourceView-2.0 in Linux and choose the ASP option, will be using a ASP/VBScript specification. Therefore I accept the convention that, in the context of the language the ASP is implicitly understood as ASP / VBScript.

ASP hasn't stop in time

As you should have noticed, despite the official languages (VBScript e JScript) of ASP do not have a large library, other languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP bring their entire built-in library ready to be used in ASP, which means that ASP is still evolving and getting better as the other languages grows and get mature. And more, the new ADO, XML and other components created for the .NET, are also available for the Classic ASP, that's why we're able to call the MSXML2.DOMDocument60, for example.

nathonjones wrote: Hi.  What is the future for classic ASP?

Best case scenario: it will continue to chug along, never evolving. Microsoft abandoned all development 10 years ago. It's unlikely to change its mind in future.

Worst case scenario: it eventually dies.

Will classic ASP code still work in the future?

As long as the server supports it, it should continue to work. However, I needed to do some testing recently on some classic ASP pages, so I installed IIS7 on my Windows 7 machine. Classic ASP was not one of the default options in the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It was hidden in the configuration setup. That seems to be a strong message from Microsoft that now is perhaps the time to start thinking about moving away from classic ASP.

I'm concerned that I'm going to be forced to convert all of my sites to a technology I have no experience of which is, if course, going to be an absolutely massive task as I manage over 50 websites. And what happens, when I devote a year or two learning a new technology and converting all of my websites, when itis no longer supported?

You need to devise a migration strategy. Start with a small site. Decide if any sites are likely to need major revision or if they're likely to wither on the vine. Create any new sites in your new technology.

Moving to a different technology is a risk. However, sites like Facebook and Yahoo! run on PHP, so it's not likely to disappear overnight.

PHP looks completely alien to me, but at the same time I don't want to learn ASP.NET because I've already learnt ASP and rumour is that it will no longer be supported.  Is there any technology / programming language that will be here for the duration?

I started with ASP, but was lucky enough to see the writing on the wall when Microsoft started devoting all its energies to ASP.NET. However, .NET wasn't ready at the time I needed it for a big project, so I switched to PHP. I found the switch very easy, but maybe that's because I hated ASP so much. Try it. I think you might be pleasantly surprised.