Developers building Web applications will welcome new tools and resources from Microsoft. The Microsoft ASP.NET Resource Kit provides tools, tutorials, and samples to help new developers learn ASP.NET. For developers who currently use ASP.NET or other existing Web technologies, the Resource Kit provides controls and components, discounts on ASP.NET training, and great deals on ASP.NET Web hosting. The ASP.NET Migration Center on MSDN includes the newly released ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides, which provide documentation, samples and utilities to help developers use existing technology investments while upgrading to ASP.NET.

The ASP.NET Resource Kit includes the popular ASP.NET Web Matrix, a free tool to build ASP.NET applications, and the ASP.NET Starter Kits, a set of five prebuilt applications complete with source code that are being used by thousands of developers to build their Web sites.

Free online training and discounted classroom training from selected developer-focused Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers (CTECs) are also part of the resource kit. In addition, the Information Management Group Inc. is offering $300 off its ASP.NET Online Training courses, and nine hours of training from Application Developers Training Co. (AppDev) with a retail value of $285 are offered free of charge.

Five leading Web hosters (Verio Inc., myhosting.com, Internet Fr, DiscountASP.NET, and Hostbasket) are offering services for $10 a month, which includes Microsoft SQL Server database support.

Microsoft also launched the MSDN ASP.NET Migration Center, providing information and tools developers need to move skills and technology investments to the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET. The center includes the previously announced JSP to ASP.NET Migration Guide and the new ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides jointly developed with ArtinSoft. These Migration Guides include free utilities to help migrate ASP code and PHP code to ASP.NET and speed the migration project by automatically converting portions of code. A migration guide, white papers and code samples also are provided to assist in project conversion.

The ASP.NET Resource Kit is available for download free of charge. Developers can also order a copy of the Resource Kit on CD for a small shipping and handling fee. The MSDN ASP.NET Migration Center and the ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides are located at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/using/migrating/.