Converting standard ASP to ASP.NET

Not knowing much about .NET, can anyone tell me that if I wanted to move away from my standard (classic) ASP site how much effort would be involved to convert my existing site to use .NET?

At the moment I am guessing I would have to do a complete re-coding exercise, however, I am hoping that Microsoft built .NET with this issue in mind.

Thanks in advance.

I don't know much about .NET either but AFAIK, ASP and ASP.NET are two different languages.
If you want to learn ASP.NET you have begin from zero, even if you have a good knowledge of classic ASP.
Thats what I heard

ASP.NET isn't a language... it's the "web-interface" of either C# or VB.NET.

Both these languages are OO (object oriented), whereas ASP is far from it... essentially meaning you'll have to learn OO, and do a complete re-write....

And lemme tell ya, i'm in (was) in the process of learning, and it's a whole new world... some very difficult paradigms to get your head around.

Well there are two options. One is to re do the whole site or 2nd is just do the portions of the site.

if u re do it then your site is most likely to have ASP.NET pages and Web Services as your front end, .NET Components as mid tier and SQL and ADO.NET as your back end. This is probably the best option because you can do alot if all three tiers have FULL compatibility. Like being able to pass DataSet between tiers including web services.

the other choice is only upgrade one or two of the tiers. this might involve developing COM+ using .NET, (not a good choice) or developing ASP.NET front end and using existing COM+ coponents( more likely option) OR just changing the COM+ in just the backend (the data tier code to access DB...this is good cuz .NET provides faster access to ORACLE and sQL servers ...also a good choice)

now choosing between them really depends on the size of your website. Is it a personal site? if yes then the 1st choice is viable and is probably the best thing to do at the moment...It will be a good chance to upgrade your site to become OO making it easier to upgrade in the future

but if ur site is HUGE..then the first choice is hard to achieve. and sometimes its unnecessary. The time and effort spent in replacing com+ would be better spent else where.

But having said that...is it even necessary for you to upgrade to .NET. I think this is a misconception everyone has. just cuz .NEt is good, it doesn't mean you need to upgrade to it. It should be IF you are going to upgrade, upgrade to .NEt not upgrade to .NET because .NET is good

I hope this helped you out a bit