Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, is Microsoft’s first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It is a Microsoft technology and program running inside IIS.

In ASP 2.0 there are six built-in objects: Application, ASP Error, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Web pages with the .asp file extension use ASP, although some Web sites disguise their choice of scripting language for security purposes.

An ASP file is a source code script file commonly used by internet pages. It is used to generate dynamic content and dynamically made web pages and helps provide information that Internet browsers will read and interpret.

ASP files can be edited with most text editing programs (such as Notepad). The following instructions are steps to open ASP files:

1 Open an Internet browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox

2 Click on the “File” menu

3 Select the “Open file” option

4 Select the ASP file you wish to open. If you want to open an ASP file from a web page which you have saved before, you can search in the folder where you have saved the web page to. Other files associated with the web page can also be seen in the folder. In addition, you can use the “search” function (in the start menu) to search the file.

5 Select “OK”

1. Dynamically edit, change, or add any content of a Web page

2. Respond to user queries or data submitted from HTML forms

3. Access any data or databases and return the results to a browser

4. Customize a Web page to make it more useful for individual users

5. The advantages of using ASP instead of CGI and Perl, are those of simplicity and speed

6. Provide security - since ASP code cannot be viewed from the browser

7. Clever ASP programming can minimize the network traffic

If you are reading this page, you are assumed to be new to Classic ASP and want to create your first dynamic ASP web page.

Please first make sure that you have installed IIS (Internet Information Services) on your system as you need one of these web servers to be able to view a page containing ASP (just opening the page in your web browser by double-clicking on the page will NOT work). If you are unsure on how to install IIS please read the tutorials on, installing IIS.

For those that do not wish to mess around attempting to install IIS (Internet Information Services) on their own computer, there are many hosting companies that supply Windows ASP Hosting including our own Free ASP Website Hosting Service.

Now you can begin creating your first ASP page.

The instructions below will display the classic 'Hello World' text in an web page as well as the time on the web server.

As ASP is going to be displayed as part of a web page, you first need to create an HTML web page, open up your favourite text editor and type the following.

Next you can begin writing some ASP. Any ASP needs to be placed in between the tags, <% ........ %>, to indicate server-side script. In this next part you will start the server side script tag and create a variable to hold the text 'Hello World'.

Notice that the variable 'strMessage' a data type has not been given , because VBScript only has variant as a data type.

Now you have created a variable to be given the value 'Hello World'.

Once the variable has a value you can now display the contents of the variable in the HTML by using the ASP 'Response.Write' method to place the contents of the variable into the HTTP stream.

Next you should use the 'Response.Write' method to write a line break into the HTML to create a new line before displaying the server time.

Again using the 'Response.Write' method and the VBScript function 'Time()' you should now display the server time on the HTML page and close the serer side script tag as you have finished using ASP in this part of the web page.

Finally you need to finish the HTML web page by closing the body tag and the HTML tag.

Next, call the file, 'my_first_asp_page.asp' (don't forget the '.asp' extension) and save the file to a directory accessible through your web server (this will usually be, 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot', on IIS or PWS with a defualt install).

To display the page open your web browser and type 'http://my_computer/my_first_asp_page.asp', where 'my_computer' is replace this with the name of your computer.

And that's about it, you have now created your first dynamic ASP web page!

Do you need to convert your asp application to an exe executable file? You could do the following.

• Burn your asp application into a cd and simply run it from the cd.

• Allow your client to use the application without revealing the source code.

• Backup and distribute the old asp application to run from the user’s desktop rather than from a server.

The company Shanghai Advance Info.& Tech.Co.,Ltd has developed a neat software to help people convert asp to exe.

Some simple steps:

1. Download the software AspToEXE.

2. After download, launch the installer. Once complete, you should see a screen just like below.

3. To import your asp project, click on the Import from Folder function. Specify the location of your ASP application and it will import your asp application into this AspToEXE software.

4. Now you’re ready to compile your ASP project. Go to File > Compile or press Ctrl + E.

5. Specify the location for the exe to be created and fill in company and copyright information.

6. Once ready, click on the Export button.

Your ASP Project has just been exported to an executable file. Go to the folder where it is exported. You should see a folder like the following: