I have been thinking of the design of PHP apps vs. ASP.NET apps as of late and I have come to a few interesting conclusions.

Please note that I do not have any facts to back up my opinions.  They are simply just my own opinions.

PHP has a lot of developers that even if they don't work on PHP projects full time, they still out number the programmers for ASP.NET that contribute to Open Source.  That is why there is so much PHP code available for various purposes.  Bulletin boards, blogs, frameworks...  If you can think of it PHP has it.

PHP is chosen because of two factors.  It's free and it's free.  A LAMP stack costs no money in software to put together.  It only costs the IT infrastructure costs that it would cost for any platform.  PHP is also Open Source and with that Open Source developers take to it like fire to gasoline.  With all this Open Source out there and a huge pool of part-time developers chipping in to fix bugs and add features, it's no wonder why PHP has the selection it does.

ASP.NET though was designed for developer efficiency.  A team of two ASP.NET developers can do the work of a team of 4 PHP developers.  It was designed to appeal to many developers already coding in the Microsoft development family.  With .NET, you don't need to learn C# and you can keep using Visual Basic.  Developer's have the whole .NET framework to take advantage of and the ASP.NET functions are just a small subset of the entire framework.

So do what works best for your purpose or just what you prefer.  If you need to crank out fully featured web apps in no time, go with ASP.NET, but if you want to cut costs and you don't have any problems relying on public code, PHP will be your best bet.

For now my personal choice is ASP.NET.  I hopefully will be able to contribute Open Source code to the ASP.NET community.  I think that whether or not the community is the driving force for an application, every platform should have one.

Oct 10, 2008