Apologies if this is a really dumb question but:

I need to build a website in ASP/ASP.NET. I'm not sure which my client has
It will be connected to a database, either MS SQL or MySQL, again I don't know which.

For development I want to get a webhost and it's much easier to get ones with ASP.NET and MySQL.

1) Can I do ASP development on host which advertises as ASP.NET server?
2) How different will the ASP/.NET code be for MS SQL and MySQL? - Can I abstract the differences somehow?
3) How difficult would it be to convert a MySQL database to MS SQL (or vice versa)?

Specifically, I was looking at NetPivotal (http://www.netpivotal.co.uk/products/)

Any help is greatly appreciated,
J

Joe Hummel recently did a series of fifteen lectures, all of them were available on the Microsoft website, however I have just had a look and they don't appear to be there anymore!

However if you follow the link to Joe Hummels web site the one at the bottom of this page (http://www.tonyhine.co.uk/access_to_vb_net.htm) you can download at least some of the lectures yourself, and the particular one relevant to your problem is the one that he tells you how to make a "data tier" he actually shows examples of how it would be easy to change from MS SQL to mySQL and other database formats. So you can then develop your project in your own way and not worry about which data source it will be used on. Although I don't think it is quite as simple as that!

Cheers Tony

this is a direct link to a page containing the list of the fifteen lectures (http://pluralsight.com/drjoe/webcasts/webcasts.aspx)

and I recon the one you want is lecture number six, and you may well be advised to watch lecture number five first.

Cheers Tony

Actually, looking at the slides those are not so lectures I've studied. So it looks like they are gone unless you can find where they've moved them to on the Microsoft site.

Gizmo,

Thanks for that, I've looked through a couple of the slides on that page, even if it's not what you hoped it was!

I'm not too worried about MySQL / MS SQL, what I'm more concerned about now is programming in ASP. Can I do that on an ASP.NET server?

I know it means writing more/complex code, but I need to start work on this asap so if I can just write ASP and have it run on ASP server or ASP.NET server (whichever my client has), then I can get going.

Cheers,
J

The netpivots link you posted supports both asp and asp.net 1.1 and 2.0 so you should be fine with them. Though you've probably already made your decision by now :)