I enjoy reading Fawcette publications online as one source of industry information, but sometimes for plain old amusement. A recent article with an author byline that begins "by by" did a relatively decent job of comparing J2EE and .NET with a fair bit of praise for ASP.NET, especially in the much anticipated 2.0 incarnation.

The amusement part began with the author's constant reference to ASP.NET as ASP. This is a clear and dead give away that the author has either never used both or has absolutely no pride. I will not pretend to make a comparison of ASP.NET and JSP because I really don't have any real experience with JSP. I have friends that do, and they like it well enough, and that's good enough for me to assume that you can get done what you need to get done in JSP, JSF, etc.

And there have been reams of paper and billions of bytes wasted on enumerating the differences between what is now generally referred to, by those who have been there, as "classic ASP" and ASP.NET. Let me just waste the following words for the author and my Java friends: ASP.NET IS NOT ASP. The only real thing shared between the two is the <% %> tag markers. And just for the record, ASP 2.0 was a long time ago.

ASP.NET is like the guy with Jr. following his name who just knows he turned out so much better than his dad and wonders to himself why the old man thought so much of himself that he had to go and give him the same name.

And the real ASP.NET 2.0 is just days away. I'm like a kid looking in at the candy store, just waiting for doors to open.

And no, I'm not going to give you a link to the story. Like the byline suggested, the story should go bye bye.