I'm not very familiar with ColdFusion. If a web server supports ColdFusion, can it also support ASP.NET for the same web site?

Assuming it can, are there any gotchas I should be concerned about?

• How easy is it for CF and ASPX pages to "talk" to each other?
• How easy is it for CF and ASPX to expose webservices that can be used by the other type of page?
• Other issues?

Thank you in advance.

Cold Fusion can coexist in the same server with ASP.NET. They are different technologies that are controlled by different frameworks. (Cold Fusion is a Java-based product, so it depends on Java Runtime,
while  ASP.NET relies on Framework.NET )

"... are there any gotchas I should be concerned about?"

Yes, there are some gotchas, particularly with Cold Fusion. It is well known that Cold Fusion is a resource hog. So, if your Cold Fusion app is resource intensive, you are more likely to get performance problems and more frequent server reboots.

"How easy is it for CF and ASPX pages to "talk" to each other?"

I dont know exactly what do you mean with "talk", but I can assume that you refer to Cold Fusion pages exchanging data and/or events with ASP.NET pages. In this case is not possible (not that I know of) to do this, unless there is some intermediary like XML or some other data exchange format.

"How easy is it for CF and ASPX to expose webservices that can be used by the other type of page?"

Cold Fusioon has some very rudimentary tools to expose web services and XML data. Of course, once the data is avaiable in XML data it can be consumed by almost any decent application, including ASP.NET apps.

 "Other issues?"

Why do you want to have ASP.NET in the server with Cold Fusion? Why Cold Fusion at all?

HTH....

 

Thank you EDM. To answer your last question, I am building a web app that may have to integrate with Cold Fusion apps that my client has purchased from another vendor. Those apps are hosted externally by the vendor but we may eventually have to host those or additional apps on our own server. The vendor has indicated that some integration will be possible via web services but other functionality may require native CF. 

You can also take a look at BlueDragon.NET, which is a ColdFusion interpreter and runtime written for ASP.NET. It will run your (or your vendor's) ColdFusion application with little or no modification, and provides full integration with ASP.NET. BlueDragon.NET is being used by MySpace.com to migrate from ColdFusion to .NET.

http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1448

http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/index.cfm

 Check out ColdFusion 8. Supposedly it can directly reference ASP.NET objects as opposed to only consuming ASP.Web services.

They also claim it's  performance has dramatically improved.

I am at a company that is running a ColdFusion website and everything else is on ASP.NET.

Having worked with both I am going to recommend that they convert the website to ASP.NET and continue to run CF8 for some great features - PDF generation and Flash charting among others.