Although there are a lot of changes incorporated into ASP.NET, do not let people scare you into believing your current skills are not good enough. If anything your life will get a lot easier. The greatly improved ASP runtime handles a lot of routine tasks for you. Although there are other major benefits of ASP.NET, here are some that will benefit the majority of development shops.
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Compiled Pages - A page is compiled into a .NET class the first time it is requested. The runtime engine will detect if any changes are made to the source code and recompile it if necessary. This should give your ASP pages a performance boost. You can optionally specify a class file with your page, if not the ASP runtime will create one for you.
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More Scripting Choice - You can code your pages with Visual Basic, C#, or JScript. VBScript has been incorporated into the VB syntax.
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Improved IDE and Debugger - No more Visual Interdev, the entire .NET family shares the same IDE and debugging tools. You will benefit greatly from the feature rich debugging tools for ASP.NET, it is a difference of night and day. The enhanced IDE is a joy to programming with.
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Server Controls - Server side components automate many common development tasks. These controls can detect the version of the browser and generate the proper HTML and JavaScript code.
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Platform Independence - The ASP runtime is capable of detecting the browser type of the requesting client and generate the proper HTML or JavaScript code. This has the potential of making your ASP.NET applications platform independent.
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Separation of Logic - Although you can currently separate business logic and presentation by utilizing ASP and COM. ASP.NET was designed with this concept in mind. It is a lot easier to encapsulate your logic from your presentation. In my opinion, application separation is the key to productivity. It allows you to maximize the abilities of your staff by assigning work accordingly. By creating .NET components and class files, you can maximize code re-use.
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Backwards Compatibility - Organizations will be able to leverage their existing investments in COM and COM+. ASP.NET applications can interface with legacy COM objects.
So why should I make the switch?
Well my biggest reasons for converting to ASP.NET are encapsulation, inheritance, server controls, and ease of deployment. I enjoy the fact that ASP.NET pages are closely integrated with .NET classes. This offers me the ability to centralize application code within classes that have a smaller footprint than COM. These classes are easier to deploy and capable of deployment over distributed networks. With true inheritance, I can create base classes to maximize code.
As I mentioned earlier, I feel application separation is the key to developing quality applications. It allows your GUI designers to work on the GUI, code warriors to work on the classes and components, and database developers to create stored procedures and views. This ability gives the development manager options and flexibility within the development cycle. Just my 2 cents =)!
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