I think this question would be better posted in the JavaScript forum. I must get a clever new signature for 2011.

In my experience when I had to host on a windows box because of the database we were using, I found IIS6 a nightmare!! The connection would fail, Permissions would change on upload and the whole set up was a nightmare. It took over a day just to get the site live and although there were some good forums on how to get php going on IIS, the reliability left something to be desired. IIS 7 may be better but IIS work well with php. I would definitely run on XAMPP for a simple setup or install apache by itself. It was simple to install and I never had a server outage or drama in over 18 months. For consistency between the platforms IIS is the way to go. The other thing to note is that some php modules that are easy to get going on debian like and cent os systems can be more tricky to get going on windows. A commonly used php module is imagemagick. File paths with windows can sometimes be a pain too.

ASP.Net is a set of technologies. Visual Studio, using either C# or VB.Net, is an integrated development environment and toolset for working with ASP.Net technologies. I recommend some of the beginner tutorials. You can build ASP.Net applications using the free Visual Studio Express editions, specifically Visual Web Developer, and use SQL Server Express for your database, all free of charge and with much of the same power as the full versions, at least at the level you'll be starting out. I recommend a site like www.LearnDevNow.com or any of the lovely tutorials found at www.asp.net to familiarize yourself with all of the tools. Good luck! Lisa Z. Morgan Lairhaven Enterprises