ASP.NET is a web development technology from Microsoft. This set of technologies can be used to build web applications and XML web services.
Principles of ASP.NET
Evens though ASP.NET takes its name from Microsoft's old web development technology, ASP, the two are very different. ASP.NET has been rebuilt completely and is based on the CLR shared by all Microsoft .NET applications. ASP.NET code can be written using any of the different programming languages supported by the .NET framework, usually Visual Basic.NET or C#.
ASP.NET attempts to simplify the transition from Windows application development to web development by allowing developers to build pages composed of controls similar to a Windows user interface. A web control, such as a button or label, can be used in very much the same way as its Windows counterpart: its properties can be assigned to in code and events can be triggered. Controls know how to render themselves and, whereas Windows controls draw themselves to the screen, web controls produce segments of HTML which form part of the resulting page sent to the user's browser.
ASP.NET uses the .NET Framework as an infrastructure. The .NET Framework is 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 is one example, and is tightly coupled with ASP.NET. Making a page to display a list of records in a database, for example, is significantly easier 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 and
- Similar metaphors to Windows application (e.g. controls) make transition between the two easier.
- Rich set of controls and class libraries allow applications to be built quickly.
Development tools
There are several software packages available for developing ASP.NET applications:
Current version
The current version is 1.1. ASP.NET 2.0 is due for release in Q1 2005. It is expected that the latest version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio.NET 2005) will also be released at this time.