ASP.NET is a set of web development technologies marketed by Microsoft. Programmers can use this set of technologies to build web applications and XML web services.

Principles of ASP.NET

Even though ASP.NET takes its name from Microsoft's old web development technology, ASP (Active Server Pages), the two differ widely. Microsoft has completely rebuilt ASP.NET, based on the CLR shared by all Microsoft .NET applications. Programmers can write ASP.NET code using any of the different programming languages supported by the .NET framework, usually Visual Basic.NET or C#. ASP.NET is faster because the entire web site precompiled to one or few dll files on a Web Server and Web Site runs faster compares previous scripting technology. Other important advantage: it can run w/o cookies using Session State. Majority of Spy-Ware has been built in cookies on client PC. If cookies have been canceled (to protect privacy) on user browser ASP.NET application can handle it. Also ASP.NET is more efficient because it manages States: View State, Session State, and Application State while some other web technologies are stateless. ASP.NET allows more secure and faster to store info to different databases (even redundantly and/or simultaneously) or XML files. ASP.NET introduced use Web Services - future of Internet. Last achievement is Master pages, which allow programmers to build web application more efficiently using Object Oriented Programming (OOP) technology: inheritance and also reuse code and web forms many times. Also “Drag And Drop” technology came to browser as “Web Parts” It is also introduced in ASP.NET 2.0

ASP.NET attempts to simplify developers' transition from Windows application development to web development by allowing them to build pages composed of controls similar to a Windows user interface. A web control, such as a button or label, functions in very much the same way as its Windows counterpart: code can assign its properties and respond to its events. Controls know how to render themselves: whereas Windows controls draw themselves to the screen, web controls produce segments of HTML which form part of the resulting page sent to the end-user's browser.

ASP.NET encourages the programmer to develop applications using an event-driven GUI paradigm, rather than in the conventional web scripting fashion. The framework attempts to combine existing technologies such as JavaScript with internal components like "Viewstate" to bring persistent (inter-request) state to the inherently stateless web environment.

ASP.NET uses the .NET Framework as an infrastructure. The .NET Framework offers a managed runtime environment (like Java), providing a virtual machine with JIT and a class library .

The numerous .NET controls, classes and tools can cut down on development time by providing a rich set of features for common programming tasks. Data access provides one example, and comes tightly coupled with ASP.NET. A developer can make a page to display a list of records in a database, for example, significantly more readily using ASP.NET than with ASP.

Advantages of ASP.NET over ASP

• Compiled code means applications run faster with more errors trapped at the development stage
• User-defined controls allow commonly used templates, such as menus
• Similar metaphors to Windows applications (e.g. controls) make transition between the two straightforward
• A rich set of controls and class libraries allows the rapid building of applications

Development tools

Several available software packages exist for developing ASP.NET applications:

• Visual Studio .NET
• ASP.NET Web Matrix
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004
• Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (for ASP.NET 2.0)

Current version

Microsoft currently ships version 1.1, with ASP.NET 2.0 in beta, scheduled for release in Q2 2005. Microsoft intends to release the latest version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio.NET 2005) at about the same time.

External links

• Official ASP.NET site
• Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2005
• ASP.NET articles
• Developer Fusion; ASP.NET tutorials and source code
• W3Schools tutorial
• Mono: An open source .NET Framework implementation that runs on many platforms
• Official Web Development Designer for ASP.NET