We are trying to make big decisions about our support for classic asp. Does anyone see a reason why Microsoft can't drop support for IIS.
Any examples of Microsoft technologies like this that have had their support dropped would help. ASP is a tricky one because dropping support in IIS would eventually kill it, unlike other technologies.
I think this is a possibility considering it is not enabled by default in IIS7.
Another point is that Visual Studio 2003 requires hacks to make it work with Vista. So its probably not a stretch to think that that IIS10 will require hacks to make classic ASP work...
It's MS' product: they can do whatever they want with it: they've dropped support for other platforms as they've matured / been replaced.
"Classic" Visual Basic 6 is already unsupported.
Of course Microsoft will eventually drop support for Classic ASP. It is not their policy to support every product forever.
I think it will be supported for the near to mid term. Evidence to back this up here
My thoughts turn to Visual Fox Pro, which should have been dead at least 5 years ago. I just ran across someone using it in production software last week. Having said that, what you should probably be concerned about is:
Given how widespread classic ASP is, I believe they will support it for a long time to come even if it's by punting the support on newer platforms to some sort of virtualization technology.
But given the amount of clout that I have at Microsoft, the fact that I've made this observation means that now they'll probably drop support starting with the next version of IIS.
Damn you, Heisenburg!!
...shakes fist in the air dramatically
ASP tips for IIS7 is another link showing there will be support for it in the latest IIS. MCMS 2002 is approaching its end of mainstream support which is coming soon though isn't quite the same scale as what ASP is.
It may not be supported out of the box in the future, but I would assume some patch or addon will be provided for support. There are still a lot of sites using ASP for processing, might put them in a crunch if they have to upgrade soon.
I believe the answer to this question, like many decisions at Microsoft, is more legal than technical.
Basically, before any major action is taken at MS, it must get passed the question, "If we do this, how likely is it that someone will sue us?"
Now, for MSFT to be sued over Classic ASP, the plaintiff would have to show that MSFT's actions prevented them from doing business (which here we'll assume that involves running a Classic ASP website). To reach that level, we'd need an IIS version N which cannot run Classic ASP at all, with IIS version N-1 no longer supported.
Verson N-1 of OS related apps tend to be supported 5 to 8 years after the release of Version N. On the other hand, maintaining minimal support of Classic ASP in IIS version N & N+1 etc should be trivial, and avoids the potential of lawsuit entirely.
Any examples of Microsoft technologies like this that have had their support dropped would help
What, like VB6? Everything will eventually get it's support dropped. It's too expensive for any company, even one with pockets as deep as Microsoft, to support everything forever.
TBH, I see this as a good reason to use open source projects. Even if the rest of the world drops an OSS project, you can still do whatever you want and have the source code around to do anything you need to.
Given that Microsoft added support for classic ASP back into Visual Studio 2008 via SP1 due I believe, to developer demand, I think they now fully appreciate how widespread classic ASP is and the need to continue supporting this technology.
I can't see them dropping it in the near future at least.
While .NET is "technically" 1000x better than Classic ASP, Microsoft would be abandoning a lot of future code superstars. I started learning how to code almost 20 years ago with BASIC for the same reason ASP is valuable... it's basic.
And let's face it, with a little know-how and today's low-cost high-performance servers you can make just about any Classic ASP application fly like there's no tomorrow.
Every major O.S. needs, MUST HAVE, a fairly robust "non-compiled" counterpart to keep people educated and interested otherwise they would be placing a huge wall in front of their future growth... new coders gravitate towards the path of least resistance.