New Language Options

ASP.NET gives you unprecedented flexibility in that it enables you to use any .NET-enabled language as your server-side code. Out of the box, you’ll be able to use Visual Basic, C#, JScript, and C++ with managed extensions as your server-side language. Note that we said Visual Basic, not VBScript. ASP.NET finally enables you to use a real programming language, not a scripted language. This offers a huge benefit in a couple areas.

First, you gain the speed of a compiled language versus an interpreted language. Because no time is wasted in parsing the scripted code, and because your code is compiled down into native machine code, you get a very significant speed increase.

Another benefit to using a real programming language is that you have real data types. If you’re familiar with ASP, you will remember that every variable is of type Variant. ASP.NET enables you to use typed languages to your advantage. Now you will never need to question whether your variable is really a String or an Integer internally because you will be able to specify its type before it is assigned.