ASP or ASP.Net?

I've been having conflicting answers on this. My personal take is that whatever's more efficient is best. I've been using ASP as my primary programming language for the past year or so, but I need something to speed up my programming process. The advantages of ASP.net for the programmer are fairly appealing, but I'm not impressed with the lack of simple portability. I'm also not impressed with the speed in any way fashion or form. I was thinking maybe PHP may be my best solution but I'm trying to start a company currently and have little/no time to learn a new language right now.

btw., I would go ahead with partial ASP.net implementation if it could provide real-time interaction with users without the use of refreshing the screen.

When you say "real time interaction", that really depends. It depends upon what you're using the page for, what controls you might have on it, etc.

PHP or ASP itself would be a good solution for you. Indeed, ASP.NET is powerful, and if you're going for a database-intensive website, then go for ASP.NET.

Else, there's still nothing wrong with ASP or PHP.

Thanks for the reply. I've considered what you've told me and concur with your conclusion. ASP is a good model.

could I for instance, do a real-time graph of statistical data with ASP or ASP.net without creating DLLs and can I convert DLL coding into ASP pages removing the necessity of registering unnecessary ActiveX Controls. If not, how could I program a portable ActiveX control that would download to the user's machine upon visiting eliminating additional installation on host machine.

Do you know Java?

You could use a Java applet to provide realtime user interaction if you don't want them to see all the JavaScript code within the HTML of the page.

Or, you could just use JavaScript for all of the realtime user interactions. It all depends on what kind of things you want to do in realtime.

As far as whether you should use PHP, or ASP/ASP.NET, now that is your preference. I prefer ASP.NET because it is more efficient to develop applications than with ASP. And ASP uses VBScript and ASP.NET uses the full fledged VB.NET language. I don't like having only one variable type in VBScript (variant).

How much more efficient is development and also can you expand on the variable type advantage.

I don't know Java but like any other language, it can be learned.

ASP.NET uses the full language and not a scripting version like in ASP. The complete object oriented design of .NET just makes it so much easier to work with once you learn it.