Full disclosure I'm not overly proud of : I (currently) still have a site humming right along using Classic ASP. Prioritizing my site's conversion to Python is kinda how my whole journey into writing the Jenkwerx framework started but, as a busy boi, my progress has been slow. The goal is to be completely Microsoft OS web free in 2026; fingers crossed there! But I'm not the only website that has to eventually quit kicking this pesky can down the road.

For being as short lived as it was (development period was only 4 years between 1996 - 2000), Classic ASP was wildly popular in the early days of the "first internet boom" and has been surprisingly resilient. Microsoft has been slowly trying to kill it since its last stable release, originally by introducing ASP.NET in 2002. But what makes Classic ASP almost universally hated by "code purists" since its release lends itself to how it lasted so long : it leveraged VBScript.

People forget (or are unaware) of how insanely popular Visual Basic was in the mid-to-late 1990s , not to mention Excel leveraged (and still uses) VBA to help put Lotus 1-2-3 out to pasture. And when that internet money train pulled into the stations in the late 90s, ASP Classic allowed many devs (professional and hobbyist alike) a familiar onboarding that Cold Fusion and Perl couldn't match.

Sadly, that's all irrelevant now. While understandable, Microsoft continues to chip away at Classic ASP dependencies, most notably the recent deprecation of VBScript.dll. And while anyone running a Classic ASP website is well aware our current websites are all pretty much living on borrowed time, the timeline to address it gets shorter by the day. We do know a few things, however :

ASP Classic appears to work on Windows 2025..

But it almost always leverages VBScript.dll, which has been deprecated...

..and will need to be activated as an FOD in the future, with no specific date as to it's complete removal.

Some optimistic and very experienced developers believe Classic ASP will continue operating just fine through 2030 and beyond and I hope they are correct. Pessimistic developers like myself, however, aren't convinced, and this VBScript depreciation with nebulous "complete removal" dates feels like Microsoft trying to speedrun things. For that reason I'm getting even more proactive to convert this insanely large Classic ASP site I currently operate. Classic ASP has been a "manual add-in" for years now, and each time I have to start on a fresh server I always experience some wonkiness; I fear (even if it's technically "available") it's only going to get worse as time progresses.

I'm trying to get my site completely rewritten by mid-year 2026 at the latest, but I do honestly believe I'll have until "around 2027" (as Microsoft quoted as the second phase of VBScript.dll deprecation) to complete things from my end. Best case scenario : I'm acting a bit chicken-little like and Classic ASP continues to function on newer OS's well into the future so as many sites as possible can safely be refactored. Given, however, that scenario would require me to put my eggs in the Microsoft corporate basket...again... I think I'll just get my ass firing on all cylinders instead..

 

Posted about my fun little project here on Mastodon and learned about the "Mastodon Server Hug" the hard way..