Migrating from PHP to ASP.NET

When discussing the migration of a project from PHP to ASP.NET one has to take into consideration basic facts about the two development tools, like the underlying architecture and functionality, while maintaining a broad perspective over the features from both technologies, which will lead to a complete understanding of the reasons why such a migration should be done in the first place.

If both PHP and ASP.NET enable a programmer to develop complex and sophisticated web sites with various purposes, like commercial, corporate, or for local uses, then the issue moves to the methods employed by the two of them to achieve such purposes and the path to get there, and not so much the end in itself. Inevitably, the way a project is completed will affect the end result, but we shall see to it that both PHP and ASP.NET technologies will get a fair comparison, so both end-result alternatives are discussed.

ASP.NET is a set of technologies embedded in the Microsoft .NET framework that builds Web applications and XML Web services. PHP, on the other hand, is more like a development language. While ASP.NET pages resemble PHP ones in execution, generating markup like HTML, WML or XML, which is sent to a desktop or mobile application, ASP.NET differs in the sense that it provides a powerful and efficient object-oriented, event-driven programming model for building Web pages. This happens at such a level of execution that a developer can feel comfortably working with ASP.NET which keeps the simplicity offered by the previous PHP development tool.

In this sense, applications created in ASP.NET are based on a robust OOP context rather than a scripting context. In fact OOP is at the core of ASP.NET, unlike PHP, even if the latter also supports objects. In a system migration from PHP to ASP.NET, most basic and simple operations can be easily translated, while more complex applications will require some careful planning and adaptation as well as an object-oriented programming perspective.
 

1. Migrating from PHP to ASP.NET - Introduction
2. Feature comparison
3. Architecture and object oriented programming capabilities
4. Compilation
5. Data and page caching