For developers, ASP.NET is the technology platform that will take us to the next level of software. If you're coming from a background of "old" ASP or VB 6, get ready for a completely new world. Microsoft decided to bet the farm on .NET and COMPLETELY overhaul their architecture. It will be easier for you to learn if you simply don't assume that anything is the same anymore.
The completely new architecture of ASP.NET does have one very good result for older technologies. you can mix and match HTML, ASP, and ASP.NET to get exactly the result you want. Your system only has to include ASP.NET files to take advantage of the new capabilities. This happens because the web server makes a determination, based on file types, about which type of processing needs to be done. An .html (or .htm) file gets sent straight to the browser, but an ASP.NET file (one that ends in .aspx), gets ASP.NET processing first. In fact, you could simply rename any valid .html or .htm file as .aspx and it would run just fine on an ASP.NET server. The only thing that would happen is that the ASP.NET software on the server would check for any ASP.NET code and then pass the file to the regular server processing.
