Classic ASP Applications on IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5 Overview

by Robert McMurray

Introduction

Microsoft introduced Active Server Pages (ASP) over a decade ago with the release of Internet Information Server 3.0 for Windows Server NT 4.0. This method of writing server-side scripts by using VBScript or JavaScript was revolutionary at that time, and helped to lay the foundation for tens of thousands of dynamic Web sites and applications. Over the years that followed, Microsoft released Internet Information Services (IIS) versions 4.0, 5.0, and 5.1; and with all these versions of IIS, ASP was installed by default and became the programming paradigm of choice for many developers.

Beginning with IIS 6.0, ASP became an optional component in IIS as the popularity of .NET technologies and ASP.NET continued to gain strength with developers around the world. In IIS 7.0, IIS 7.5, and above, Microsoft's support for ASP.NET has reached new levels of maturity; likewise, by using FastCGI, so has support for non-Microsoft development Web technologies such as PHP and Ruby on Rails.

Despite the popularity of ASP.NET and other development technologies, developers who continue to use applications that rely on the classic version of ASP will still find IIS to be a first-class development platform when they consider the deployment environment for their applications. The topics in this section provide developers and Web server administrators with information to consider when deploying classic ASP applications.