Will asp.net work on a Debian server?

July 10, 2008 10:29 AM

I am trying to teach myself asp.net. My hosting company is iPower and apparently their server platform is Debian. Will asp.net run on this platform? The (really basic) aspx pages I've tried sort of work but not really, and I am copying code verbatim from Microsoft's site so I'm sure I haven't fucked up the code. I'm fine with HTML and CSS but this stuff is a bit beyond me.

If asp.net won't work, what other language should I teach myself? iPower definitely does support PHP, Perl, MySQL, and PEAR (I've never heard of the last one). Basically I'm bored and I want to learn something useful during my downtime at work. It won't be useful to my current job, but I want to get into the GIS field so if one of these would be better than another please advise. (Similar to my previous question) I can't install anything on my work machine (Windows XP).

posted by desjardins to computers & internet (13 comments total)

I would say given your restrictions try learing perl or php instead. I use asp.net daily and it's actually quite nice, but the real benefits come in when using Visual Studio, which apparently you can't install locally to try out. Perl and php are plain text files so you can just use notepad and upload them to your server to run. Not the most efficient way to go, but it will work.

If you want to try asp.net at home, you can download the Express Edition for free. There are also plain C# and C++ editions.
posted by beowulf573 at 10:37 AM on July 10, 2008

ASP.net won't run on Linux, no. You need a Windows-based host (for learning, you can run it on your own machine).
posted by kindall at 10:41 AM on July 10, 2008

A quick look at their product offerings and knowledge base suggests that you'll need to use one of their Windows hosting plans to use ASP.net. In theory it can be run under linux using parts of the Mono project, but I didn't have much luck getting it working on the cPanel linux webhost I was using, even though they supposedly provided a prepackaged config.

PHP/MySQL has the advantage of being available on just about any web host, and there is a hell of a lot of open source PHP software that you could learn from by reading and extending. I'd argue that isn't as rich an ecosystem of opensource software for ASP.net.

Some people will say that you'd be better off starting with Ruby on Rails, or Python + Django, but it doesn't look like the web host you've chosen makes that easy. (there are plenty of other web hosts to choose from though)
posted by Good Brain at 10:44 AM on July 10, 2008

You've got linux hosting, so I'd definitely start with php. perl is not a good first language to learn. I'd also suggest python, if available. I'm currently doing GIS-related-websites in php/mysql, but my background is software development, not GIS.

My GIS-educated friends all started with Java, however, which also works easily w/ Linux.
posted by cgg at 10:44 AM on July 10, 2008

Just FYI, Mono includes some asp.net support, but I'm not sure how complete it is or if it's a point where a hosting company could use it.
posted by beowulf573 at 10:56 AM on July 10, 2008

You've got linux hosting, so I'd definitely start with php. perl is not a good first language to learn.

That PHP is a better first language than Perl is a view not universally shared.
posted by enn at 10:59 AM on July 10, 2008

That PHP is a better first language than Perl is a view not universally shared.

"Better" is not a concept that is universally shared.
posted by toomuchpete at 11:24 AM on July 10, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Most of your question has been addressed, so I will just note that PEAR is not a language.

It is the "PHP Extension and Application Repository", which means that it is a set of packages that you can use. They are written in PHP and can be incorporated into most any application.
posted by cCranium at 12:33 PM on July 10, 2008

ASP and PHP share a lot of common ground, at least in terms of syntax. Depending on what you're trying to do, conversion should not be too hard. I've had a variety of different hosts; I had to modify the PHP template that loaded all of my content pretty-much every time I switched hosts. I only had to use ASP once, so I am by no means overly familiar with it.

I don't do very much complicated PHP stuff, the only reference I use is PHP.net
posted by Dark Messiah at 12:43 PM on July 10, 2008

It's *possible* to run ASP.NET applications under Linux using Mono XSP. More information here. I wouldn't recommend it if you actually want to get anything done...
posted by strangecargo at 1:42 PM on July 10, 2008

If you've got an account on iPower, and want to play with a web scripting language, use PHP. It's the quickest route to getting something working. simple as <php print "hello world."; ?>

I would also try to figure out the most painless way to edit files directly on the webserver. Ideally, you can make a change to the PHP file, save it, and click reload in the web browser to see it.

You might want to try to find a host that has SSH (secure shell) access. This would allow you to use putty (doesn't need to be installed) to ssh to your webserver and edit PHP files directly.
posted by kamelhoecker at 2:14 PM on July 10, 2008

heh, well it's simpler when you don't have to encode your html entities. <?php print 1+1; ?>
posted by kamelhoecker at 2:16 PM on July 10, 2008

I work at an exclusively PHP development shop. Please allow me to present a balanced, nuanced view of PHP as a language, development environment and software culture:

It's crap. Parts of it seem almost explicitly designed to make doing things the Wrong Way easy and tempting. Most of the existing software and tutorials were written by twelve year olds. That said, it absolutely works, it's absolutely possible to write good PHP code and build good PHP apps and run solid PHP services (viz Yahoo, Flickr, et al) and the language itself is definitely getting better.

Perl is a great language but hard for a beginner to pick up (IMO). It's fantastic but not exactly clear.

You might have good luck with Google's App Engine, following the basic tutorial gets you a working guestbook, it's hosted for free, and Python is a great language with a reputation for high-quality things being done in it.

I'm happy to chat about this here or via email/memail/whatever.
posted by Skorgu at 6:01 PM on July 10, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]