The ageless debate has finally caught up with me... which is better? ASP.NET or PHP? I am no expert at PHP buit I have used it a couple of times and familiar with its syntax and features. and honestly in my humble opinion, I think that neither should be pit against the other. They work better in different scenarios. For e.g. for a simple personal website, ASP.NET might be a bit of an overkill, that's not to say it cannot be used. PHP was built from the ground up to be a fast and dirty coding language. ASp.NET on the other hand is more streamlined. For an enterprise environment, I would suggest working with ASP.NET simply because of the robustness offered by IIS/MS SQL/ASP.NET combination over LAMP. Again, this is not to say LAMP cannot be used in these scenarios, but Microsoft provides a lot more support while open source software relies so heavily on the community to provide the support backbone. PHP is unique in the sense that though it does support object oriented programming, it does not force the user into OOP. ASP.NET using C# or VB.NET will force the user from the start to have object oriented design and implementation. While this might seem like a very good idea, it is usually a hinderance in the simpler projects. PHP requires no prior declaration of variables unlike C# or VB.NET. These simple ideas make programming in PHP a breeze though not always the most efficient way to code. ASP.NET on the other hand keeps the code clean by adhering to OOP. I personally choose to work with ASP.NET because I honestly am biased towards the .NET framework having been more familiar to it. Microsoft offers a range of products and services which integrate with the .NET framework or are built on top of the .NET framework. This makes it easy for adding functionality by using one of the products ... for e.g using Microsoft Dynamics I can integrate Point of Sale functionality directly into the Web application I am working on. With PHP, this would usually mean searching for a 3rd party product which may or may not be free along with the fact that support for it might be non existent.
So does this mean PHP will soon fade away? The answer is no!! I think PHP is a solid and reliable solution for small scale projects which are constrained by budget. ASP.NET might be a tad bit more complex for some projects but it will always get the job done in the end.