1. What is ASP?

ASP stands for Active Server Pages, a language which is designed to run with windows based servers. It uses IIS and MSSQL as database while designing database driven websites. We'll start with a look at why Microsoft has decided that we need a new version of ASP, and how it will help your website, as a webmaster, to meet the needs of the future when creating Web sites and applications.

• Currently, ASP can only be scripted using the basic non-typed languages such as VBScript and JScript (unless you install a separate language interpreter). While ASP does parse and cache the code for the page the first time it is executed, the limitations prevent more strongly-typed languages like Visual Basic and C++ from being used where this would be an advantage. ASP+ provides a true language-neutral execution framework for Web applications to use.
  
  
• It is also very easy to create huge ASP pages containing a spaghetti-like mixture of code, HTML, text, object declarations, etc. And it's hard to re-use code, unless you place it in separate 'include' files - not the best solution. In many environments, developing a Web application utilizes the skills of a wide range of professionals, for example, you have programmers writing the code, and designers making the HMTL look good. Having both the code and the content intermixed in a single file that both of these groups need to operate on makes it difficult for them to work together. ASP+ allows true separation of code and content.