This story is not a debate on "ASP.NET vs PHP", but this story is about the people who develop their web applications with PHP, but pretend that they are using ASP.NET. Yes, such people do really exist. I came across their posts in the forums, where they said that or asked how to change the extension of PHP scripts to .aspx.
Why on Earth are they doing that? Basically, they want to look more serious. For some reason, .aspx looks more sophisticated, serious and more enterpisy. The reason is actually well known, ASP.NET usually powers well known companies that everybody look up to.
However, often it's not the developers who want to "be more serious", but their clients who either demand the pages to have the ".aspx" extension or want to the web site to be written with ASP.NET. The latter is the worst case, I believe, because in such a situation, the developer lies to his client. He was hired to build a web site with ASP.NET, but in fact he does with PHP or with something else. I think it is really a lack of work ethic.
This post is partly inspired by the Rick Strahl's article, which is called "ASP.NET gets no Respect", where he puts his thoughts regarding that fact that people and especially the young developers, who are eager to launch their start-up project, simply disregard ASP.NET and prefers to use a more fashionable platform, like Ruby on Rails. While I agree with him on this point, there are people do an opposite thing - write their web sites with PHP and put the ".aspx" extension at the end of their files. <irony>Well, the world is really ridiculous...</irony>