Well a lot of companies typically work with Microsoft software throughout the enterprise and thus they develop web applications using ASP.NET. But there are also other companies that do PHP pages as well as Ruby on Rails and Django. I wouldn't say either platform is easier or harder to create the basic things you are talking about there. They are just different. ASP.NET uses C# or VB.NET to create code while you have PHP for PHP sites. If you were to go to ASP.NET then you would just use the most recent version of Visual studio you can get your hands on. But most of these details will be set by the enterprise you work for. They often will tell you which visual studio version to work with or which platforms to use. :)

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If you are referring to the global.asx file you find in most ASP.NET projects, then no, PHP doesn't work like the event driven setup that ASP.NET applications are. When a request comes in for a PHP file, that file is handed to the PHP interpreter which adds in any included files and then parses the file in memory. Just like if you were given a book and you were to read it line by line through the entire book. It then takes the response generated from interpreting the code and gives it back to the user. It does not fire events as it interprets. So there is no such thing as Application_BeginRequest or Application_Start calls. It just reads the file and generates a response. Hopefully that is what you mean. :)

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