The first thing to note is that ASP and ASP.Net are not programming languages. They are a technology that Microsoft created that allows programming languages to be embedded into a web page to allow dynamic web pages. The second thing to note is that there are major differences between ASP and ASP.Net. ASP was basically an html file with Visual Basic embedded into it. This is called an interpreted language. However, ASP.Net is compiled code, along with a Tag notation that achieves a similar purpose. With ASP.Net you are not as limited in your choice of languages, although most people will probably stick to either Visual Basic or C# to run their programs. This means that if Microsoft chose to support it, you could write code for an ASP.NET application in java, php or any other language. What probably makes a lot of people use ASP.Net is Visual Studio.Net which is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is used to create most ASP.Net programs. It provides a way to quickly and easily create a web page that looks exactly how you would like it to by clicking and dragging items with your mouse. By contrast, using a language like PHP for example, you would have to write the HTML out yourself. For a really good example of the differences between ASP and ASP.Net, you can take a look at http://www.tutorial-web.com/asp.net/ You may want to note that many other web programming languages such as PHP and Ruby (on Rails) are similar to ASP in that they are interpreted languages.