I am wondering if ASP.NET is a good choice to build small such as personal websites, blogs, photo gallery to medium websites such as online booking, medium sort of facebook!, etc?
I have heard that ASP.NET and MS SQL Server take more resources than PHP and MySQL which means it could be only good for rich people who are able to pay for these resources!
Could any one explain please?
what does that mean? 
You can’t believe everything someone says. Who told you that junk anyway?
I have both a linux (apache, php, mysql) host and a WinServer (WinServ, .NET, MSSQL) host. The PHP host is $7/month, the Window host is $5/month. :shrug:
Work with what you know. Use whichever you want.
I don’t mean the hosting. It is said that ASP.NET and MS SQL Server takes more resources regarding RAM for example!
With RAM costing somewhere around $10 per GB is that even relevant? All other components (CPU, mobos, cases, etc) are all the same across either platform.
Even so, I’ve never heard that. :shrug:
In my experience concerning setting up a server for a company the difference between installing apache/php versus Windows server is that Windows server and MSSQL server costs money but everything works as expected on first install. Basically, everything is ready to go in an hour or two. Apache/php is open source but takes a lot more to install, tweak and maintain. It’s basically equivalent with a slight advantage to the Windows side. You’re either paying for the install disks or your paying someone to install it. It’s a wash. That’s just for hosting sites though, if you’re talking about installing a secure intranet for sharing data, between wide and/or local area networks I’d give Windows install a huge lead.
Asp.net takes up more memory because the webapplication stays loaded (kinda like fast-cgi php) and lots of stuff is cached. MSSQL is DESIGNED to use all the memory it can because accessing RAM is much faster than accessing disk. You can setup the maximum memory allowed for MSSQL though.
That being said, you can use any Sql server you want you’re not forced to use MSSQL. MySQL, POstgresql, SqLite, MSSQL Compact 
and so on.
Performance wise, a well designed and developed asp.net application will thrash your standard php application any day since it doesn’t need additional optimizers(not free!). When yahoo or facebook uses php (with tonnes of modules coded in C for performance) you can’t say it really uses php…
How much resources an application requires depends on what it does and how is coded. For the moment I’m hosting 2 asp.net applications( blogengine.net and portfolioengine.net) on a shared account with maximum 75 or 100MB memory limit (I don’t know for sure). Luckily I have the option not to use a database, but with a good hosting the Sql database would be hosted on a dedicated server and it won’t count to the application memory limit.
If you’re referring to a VPS, I had an online game which held almost everything in memory (the world, the players- ok there were at max 80 players) on a 1GB RAM VPS and the IIS worker process took up to 125MB while MSSQL occupied the minimum configured memory (the db file was around 16MB). Long story short I always had around 300MB of Ram free. On a VPS the OS and control panel occupies around 250-300MB of RAM)
Now, what kind of application you want to develop and you think asp.net is too expensive?
I used to write my websites solely in PHP with a MySQL database. Nowadays, you’d have to pry Visual Studio and SQL Server out of my cold, dead hands.
ASP.NET and C# are absolutely fantastic. ASP.NET can have its issues, but when you’re used to it you’ll wonder how you ever wrote websites without it. C# is probably the finest programming language in the past decade, and from C#2 and beyond has established itself as a trend-setter. When I think about the year 2000 and writing PHP code, and writing lambda expressions for my CMS now I really feel like I am in the future.
My understanding still isn’t that great, but while it may take some more resources to run it can be heavily optimised and a great ASP.NET website will often trounce most PHP websites. I’ve recently started playing with ASP.NET Razor, a view engine that works well for small websites and its tiny, even when compared to some of the PHP sites I’ve built over the past few years.
You’ll find that imaginekitty is correct in that you shouldn’t always believe what you read. Give ASP.NET a good try and I’m sure you’ll love it.
I’m still trying to love it but the truth is that I jumped from ASP Classic to PHP and now I’m trying to figure out how to work with .NET
Does anyone know of a good .NET example for a photo gallery? I have a gallery with a million photos (and growing steadily) in a database and I have problems with the programming the previous guy did.
Furthermore, I can’t understand why his script works in one computer and not in other with the same OS and version (both have IIS 5.5 installed). It is driving me nuts so I hope that a good example could lead me into the right way.
I’m doing a favor to my sister else I would have never got involved in this.
I’ve search hotscript and some other sites but the only one I found as a possibility are commercial and I’m not willing to pay until I know it really fits the site.
It’s very simple to implement a galley in .net, basically you just store pic locations then read from the db, send them to a view page, use Fancybox (or other gallery plugin) to display them nicely. 1-2 hours tops from scratch.
This is when I prove that I am crap with .NET 
The locations are calculated on the fly (there is a logic between the names of the pictures (numbers) and the folders they’re kept in)
The real problem comes when the pictures need to be viewed. This guy used an ADO Stream to send the thumbnails and pictures (this is the ASP Classic version). This is the part that works in some computers but not in others although they have the same configuration.
Wha’? If the images are stored on the file system (not in db) once you know their name it’s just a matter of outputting <img> tags in the response. I suppose you don’t want to rewrite the app in .net, but I think the same approach is viable on classic ASP as well.
The pictures are stored in folders, the details and texts related to those pictures are in the DB.
I didn’t do the script and I don’t understand this guys logic so his script is kind of difficult to figure out.
I’d probably followed the same approach. I assumed that he used this object to create the thumbnails but I will confess that I don’t know if this assumption is correct.
I don’t even know why he’s using ADO Stream Object
Because he’s a bad developer Somehow , most of the time, it seems that only those people are chosen to get a job done…
If you’re looking for code to implement blogs and forums then chances are someone has already done that for you. You certainly don’t want to re-invent the wheel. There are many packages available for those types of things in both PHP and .NET. I would find a package that you like and let that dictate your choice, rather than worrying about what it is written in.
For instance, I’m integrating a blog (BlogEngine.net) and a forum (ASPPlayground) into my site and wouldn’t ever imagine writing them myself.
No, this is a photo gallery. The database has a million of pictures listed. I’ve been trying to find a good script that I can adapt to the database but so far all I found looks like rubbish to me.
I was speaking more to the original poster.
You could purchase one that is already built, or get someone else to design the site and use [URL=“http://www.asp.net/community/control-gallery/Item.aspx?i=3485”]an ASP.net control to do the heavy-lifting. Again, I certainly wouldn’t design one from scratch unless you have lots of free time.
Ooops… sorry.
I may not be optional as it has to fit certain requirements and that database needs to have a certain structure. But thanks for the help. I will certainly look those links and see if I can take any advantage of them
I always recommend LAMP over the MS stack. It’s simpler & free.
That’s just my preference though, like the first response said - use what you know.
If you don’t know either go with php.
I know and am familiar with PHP.
PHP has always been powerful and dependable for me and ASP has not, so I, personally, abhor ASP and absolutely do not recommend any usage thereof.
But that is just my 2 cents.