I asked the same question on one of the ASP forums and got some excellent 

answers.



You may want to search the archives and have a read.



The upshot was really that there is no discernable difference if I 

remember correctly and it comes down to coding style.



> The issue of coding style and standards has come up with work...

> I am curious to hear others' comments on the topic, and article/book 

> references...

> 

> My assumptions:

> - Performance is important, but it's not the only consideration (others 

> would be development time, maintainability, extensibility, etc...).

> - Performance often comes at a price (it can take away from readability 

of 

> code and adds complexity thereby taking away from maintainability or 

added 

> time to development).

> 

> What I like to do:

> There's are different stages of development.

> In general I try to keep the asp logic code up at the top of the page, 

> with html (as html - i.e. switch context) down below and plug in 

variables 

> or function calls where/as appropriate with <%=whatever%>.

> I will even switch context in loops.

> 

> Why I like to do it this way:

> I work with asp and html. I like to see the html as html (color coded 

and 

> formatted with indentation).

> When I have the html as strings and response.write it or build the html 

as 

> strings it often gets too messy to deal with later. This way, I 

> can "seperate the logic from the presentation" as much as possible and 

it 

> helps me keep the page maintainable (i.e. readable).

> 

> What about performance?

> To begin with, some performance hits are worth taking! We write in asp 

> code not assembly language, right ;-)

> Therefore, even if it did take a toll on performance I would still 

> consider coding this way.

> If the performance hit were "too high", I would still probably write my 

> code the same way I like to and later on in the development stages, once 

> the html part was "set in stone" I would start optimizing for 

performance 

> and response.write it...

> Even so, I've seen numerous "benchmarks" showing that in nt4 context 

> switching was a hit to performance (although I'm not sure it's always 

such 

> a "significant" hit that it takes away the benefits of context 

switching) 

> HOWEVER in asp 3.0 on win2k context switching can even perform better 

and 

> is not a performance hit.

> 

> My questions:

> 1) what are your thoughts?

> 2) what do others do and why?

> 3) any resources to point us to?

> 

> Thanks,

> Arthur Gaisin

> agaisin@c..., agaisi1@g...