Where are you from, by the way...? Just wondering about the total irony
bypass...

Yep! I was not thinking while typing ! Got mixed up with Beta released.
Thanks for the correction.

John Webb

if I remember the exact phrase was it would be "competitively priced"

Hi Martin,

I'm afraid you still have to be more specific in order to get an
authoritative answer. You say that you main concern is what technology you
use to build your database-driven web application. However, again, that is
dependent upon the requirements for your dissertation. Assuming that you
want to showcase some unspecified "skills," what skills do you want to
showcase? You state that your VBA project last year did not meet "the
criteria." What ARE the criteria?

Selecting a technology is not simply a matter of finding out what a bunch of
worldwide strangers who may or may not have various skills and skill levels
have to say, for whatever reasons they may have. That is hardly going to
give you a worthy answer. For example, there are occasionally 12-year-olds
who post in these newsgroups. There are people who know almost nothing about
programming who post in these newsgroups. There are people who post in these
newsgroups because they don't know what a newsgroup is, or simply to incite
controversy. How do you know which advice is going to be good advice? In
addition, you've already received a number of replies, none of which is
based on any knowledge of what your requirements are. In other words, the
advice given so far has been based upon the subjective like or dislike of a
given technology, which is often of a "religious" nature. There is an old
saying: "Consider the source." However, there is very little information
about the sources you are seeking advice from. Any advice you receive based
upon the lack of criteria you've provided is going to be unreliable.

So, how about giving us a clue as to what these mysterious criteria are? As
I mentioned in my earlier reply, learning a web application technology takes
a variable amount of time, partly due to the learning curve associated with
that technology. It will take quite a while to learn ASP.Net, while ASP,
which will be around for years to come, can be learned in a relatively short
period of time. In either case, writing web applications is much more
difficult than writing desktop applications. The user interface is HTML,
which can be viewed on a variety of systems, using a variety of browsers,
and with a variety of screen resolutions and window sizes. In addition,
we're talking about a stateless HTTP environment. Memory management is one
of the most difficult aspects of web application programming. You don't want
to spend a year or more learning a technology which you may never use again.
But we have no idea whether or not you intend to use it again.

So, in order to help you make a wise decision about your "main concern," we
need more information about your personal requirements and reasons for
needing to use one of these technologies.