I've been scripting my pages using PHP for a while now, and I've always thought it was pretty darn neat. And I still do. But... I may be crossing over to the dark side.

GASP!

Heh. Not really. But I did recently get a chance to build a web form in ASP.NET, and it was pretty f--ing cool, pardon my French. For the most part, the process to develop a page in ASP.NET is the same as in PHP, except Microsoft gives you a few tools you can use to build the web site, a-la Dreamweaver (without the f--ing insistence on tables...).

The part I thought was the most interesting was that I had to use ASP versions of the various HTML form controls. The neat thing is that ASP.NET controls save state. For you non-programmers, that means the controls remember whatever text was entered into them, or whether or not they are checked/selected. You can do the same thing with PHP, but you have to build the logic yourself. With ASP.NET, you get it for free...

EDIT:

Ok, so a few years later, and my affection for ASP.NET has definitely waned. Well, let's be more precise. I pretty much abhor WebForms, the default web application type in ASP.NET projects. Now, ASP.NET MVC, on the other hand, is just freakin' cool. You get access to the Microsoft stack of technologies, but without the ugly view-state crap that WebForms dumps into your markup in order to provide the "statefullness" I was so ebullient about before.

Live and learn, I guess...