2.2. Development
ASP.NET integrates seamlessly with VS.NET IDE. VS.NET includes built-in support for creating and modifying content. This unifies the ASP/VB programming models for the developers. Instead of opening multiple IDEs (as with Classic ASP platform), developers can open a single IDE and do all their work from a clean, consistent interface. VS.NET is equipped with powerful debugging environment. This means that the powerful debugger for Windows applications is now available to debug Web applications as well.
ASP.NET enables programmers to take advantage of the OOP model, for example, code sharing. Under OOP model, one of the most common ways to achieve code sharing is inheritance, which is not available in Classic ASP. Since complete OO features are supported in ASP.NET, developers can transfer their OO design smoothly into ASP.NET code, enabling a software company to keep their Windows application development styles, with which they are familiar, in Web application development; and also they can convert their Windows applications into Web applications without major modifications.
ASP.NET’s improved state maintenance features enable us to provide users with Web applications that are richer and faster than Classis ASP (Olges,2002). ASP.NET supports advanced session state management. There are two major problems with session management in Classic ASP: session objects are stored in the Web server memory and session IDs are stored on the client computers as cookies. These prevent session management from being efficiently implemented. ASP.NET solves these problems in two ways: it provides a “cookieless” option for session objects so that a session ID can be passed via URL; it provides three different session modes (in process, state server, and SQL Server), so that a session object can either be stored on the Web server, a remote server or a database.
3.THE MOTIVATIONS FOR MOVING
3.1. The industry motivation
For these three semesters, the total ASP/ASP.NET projects are increasing, but slowly. However the Classic ASP projects are dropping quickly and the ASP.NET projects are increasing rapidly (in the speed of more than 12% per semester). This gives us an idea that ASP.NET is preferred over Classic ASP in industry especially given that ASP.NET is only officially first released in 2002. Our student’s feedbacks from their industry communication confirm this view. A huge number of articles on the Internet also support this view. This encourages us to drop Classic ASP and move to ASP.NET in our WAD course. Higher education has over years recognized that it is a service industry and has to revaluate their approach in the industry by placing greater emphasis on meeting the expectations and needs of their stakeholders (Nair, 2002).
 3.2. The student motivation
 The students demand ASP.NET. When students enroll in our WAD course, most of them are aiming to become a professional software developer. As a matter of fact, some of them already are software developers, or they were software developers and are seeking to return to the workplace. Techniques highly demanded in workplace are of great interest to them.
4.THE PROBLEMS
 We have to admit that ASP.NET with VS.NET is a much more complicated client server environment than the Classic ASP environment. This complexity comes from the ASP.NET configuration system and the integration between the client computers and the Web server.
On ASP.NET server, each level of the application directory can have a configuration file. All these configuration files are optional except Machine.config. A developer has full control over those optional configuration files. Developers become more involved with the server settings via these files. One problem that happened to several students and myself on our home servers is the permission problem. We found our ASP.NET applications didn’t have permission to write to database/XML files. Microsoft (2003) provides three solutions to this problem. The simplest one is to change the Machine.config file and set the username attribute to SYSTEM in the section. 从经典ASP到ASP.NET英文文献和中文翻译(2):http://www.751com.cn/fanyi/lunwen_41701.html