Both PHP and ASP.NET are able to produce complex and sophisticated websites with various purposes, like commercial or corporate, but the difference between the two programming tools resides at the level of methods employed by each one to achieve the same goals. If the first is an open-source development language, the second is a set of technologies included in the Microsoft.NET framework that builds web applications and XML web services.
They are similar in execution, they both generate markup like HTML, WML or XML, which is sent to a desktop or mobile application. The difference is that ASP.NET provides a powerful and efficient object-oriented, event-driven programming model for building web pages and it so happens, because, unlike PHP, applications built in ASP.NET are built from the start on a robust OOP context, and not on a scripting context.
Moving on to the feature comparison, some of the first most relevant ones to discuss are the coding languages supported, the compiling logic, and the output caching for full and partial pages. If PHP supports some OOP concepts and C++ and C#, ASP.NET, on the other hand, has full support for more than 25 languages, like the widely used Visual Basic.NET and C#, and many more. In this case, a developer can stick to one language, but actively use components from other languages as well. As for compiling logic, both development tools have compilation support, with the difference that ASP.NET already has dynamically and pre-compiled modes.
The output caching is really a feature that sets the two apart: PHP has no native support for neither full or partial page, while ASP.NET is equipped with support for full page through any combination of one or several URL parameters, browser type or custom function, and native support for partial pages through the use of User Controls, using the Cache API data and other objects can be cached with complex expiration rules.
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