Is ASP.Net platform independent? [closed]

Question

At a recent discussion on Silverlight and advantages of SilverLight over ASP.NET, it was brought up that ASP.NET is not platform independent but Silverlight is. What exactly does that mean ? Is/Is Not ASP.NET platform independent ?

Answer 1

ASP.NET itself is not platform independant - it runs on IIS, which is a web server that runs on Windows. The output of ASP.NET is platform independant because it is raw HTML/JavaScript/etc.

Silverlight can be considered platform independant because it can be served up by virtually any sort of web server because it doesn't execute on the server - it is simply another type of file that is delivered to the browser and it executes within the browser. It isn't universally platform independant though because there are platforms that Silverlight components will not run on (like the iPad), whereas the output of ASP.NET should run fine on these devices.

Edit:

Technically (as pointed out by Tom Tom) you can run ASP.NET on Linux using the Mono framework, if you are happy using the equivalent of v2.0 of the .Net framework (source here). Mono itself is at the equivalent of v4.0 of the framework, but ASP.NET lags considerably, meaning it is not really a viable option unless you really are determined to do things for free (in which case why use ASP.NET 2? Use PHP or similar instead).

Answer 2

This is what i got from a site while searching

ASP.NET is not a language in itself rather a web technology that uses .NET programming languages to build dynamic web sites and web applications. I suppose the question is if .NET is platform-independent?

My answer would be 'currently, no'. .NET is slowly catching up but it is still way to go before it become platform independent. The framework works only on WINDOWS at present and not on other OS. I would say it is language independent. That is to say any language targeting CLR can be used to write code for applications.

A new project called MONO is in works which will allow the .NET framework to be installed on LINUX but there's no official support from MS on this as of now.