Wow, I think this thread has gotten a bit out of hand. There is no need for it to turn into a flame war. You will always get your fanboys from each platform and both are good and very able platforms. So choose what is right for you. And lets please keep this thread civilized.
As I said before, this is my personal experience and nothing else. I always find harder to find information about what I want to do in .NET than in PHP.
Regarding creating bad/good code, I don’t think that it depends on the language itself but on the good understanding and experience of the programmer.
Regarding documentation, I’ve never had a problem neither with .NET or with PHP which also extensively documented.
I’m ashamed to say that it may be my fault that we have drifted so much from the original topic. Sorry.
Answering the original question: ASP (Classic or .NET) or PHP both are suitable for small, medium or large sites. It really depends on personal preference, the type of hosting you want to use and, more than anything, which one of them you feel most comfortable with.
I’d really argue that ASP is unsuitable for anything anymore – its 10 years old without an update at this point and really doesn’t do basic things out of the box – like file uploads. It would be folly to build anything new on that platform in 2011. Or even in 2005.
Completely agree. My reference to Classic was more due to the amount of old sites still there.
Isn’t this a potential issue for some? Wordpress doesn’t work with .Net, does it?
As my experience, It’s not bad at all as it provides MSSQL or SQL on any server and along with that we get a freedom of utilizing end number of static pages.It also user friendly as other Microsoft Product.
What does Wordpress have to do with anything?
I think that his point is that major CMS and blogging platforms don’t work with .NET but with PHP and that’s an issue if he ever wanted to move to .NET. It automatizes 90% of the process of creating a site.
I know that there are CMSs and blog engines for .NET but their popularity is nothing compared to WP or Joomla or Drupal. It is just a fact, nothing else.
A lot of people building smallish web sites would best stick with Wordpress…
So it has to be Wordpress and nothing else? That is just silly.
I fail to see how popularity has anything to do with it.
Didn’t mean to imply that. Just making a comment that if you want to use Wordpress or one of the other third-party tools, you might want to look into it.
Wordpress is writing in php. Its not random code that runs on php platform. If it was written in .net. So that really has nothing to do with the platform.
I’m a bit late to the game, but just wanted to chime in.
I’m not a big fan of ASP.NET. The reason: it makes people lazy. ASP.NET can generate a lot of HTML for you, however, it’s made by Microsoft and we know how good they do with HTML. =p
We have a back-end system at work that is being developed by a third-party. They’re using ASP.NET and lazy with their HTML (just let ASP.NET handle it)… it makes me want to gauge my eyes out with a spoon.
Those negatives can be gotten around, but most don’t. I personally prefer PHP/MySQL for web development.
However, at the same time, I do love C#.NET, so I can see why many people like using ASP.NET, since it’s very similar in many regards.
So so wrong… Asp.Net Web Forms (classic asp.net) generates html when you use rich controls. You could skip them, use other controls (free or paid) or write all the html,js by hand.
Asp.Net MVC by default ‘forces’ you to write html/css/js by hand. Yes, bad developers are lazy with everything, however I prefer to see convoluted html (browsers don’t care) than a messy backend. Html is easy to rewrite, a backend is not.
Not only smallish websites… major large ones use it too. WP is very powerful and scalable and can take thousands and thousands of articles with thousands of visits. And as CMS is also extremely powerful.
Popularity has lots to do with it. Things don’t become popular for nothing although popular doesn’t always means that it is good. In the case of WP, it is the major blogging platform with good reason.
It also has to do with the amount of documentation and help that you can find, or the number of forums that can answer your questions and so on.
And I don’t think that he meant that it had to WordPress and nothing else. I think he meant if there’s anything in .NET that works as beautifully as WP.
My interpretation is that he meant that lots of people use CMSs or Blogging softwares to speed up the process of creating and selling websites. You add the extra features, the skin, and you’re ready to go.
Since WP is the major and most flexible and written in PHP, that may be a reason why people learn PHP instead of .NET
If my interpretation is correct, then it does have something to do with this.
If you’re more on the biz side than the coding side, which probably isn’t the case here, WPress has a huge amount of built in functionality. You can have incredibly powerful features built into it w/ minimal effort, especially for those who are int’d in quick monetization. I don’t use it myself, but I just thought some of the new people might want to read about it if they haven’t already…
Oh right because there is no lazy framework in PHP that does the same thing. Of course not that would just be silly! PHP has no frameworks or anything of that nature. Right?
The issue you describe as nothing to do with ASP.NET, the issue you describe is purely a developer issue. Just so we are clear, ASP.NET is not a language, it is a framework.
yes, u can say that but if u use HTML for small medium website then it’s even more better then ASP.NET 
Wow… this forum should be opened only to people who either know asp.net or are sincerely trying to learn it. Other than that it’s just a place where people show of their ignorance about a technology,
Off Topic:
People, keep it civilized and on topic, please. We’re all entitled to be wrong and corrected, if that’s necessary.