ASP.NET is the latest Web development environment from Microsoft.
It brings the concept of "form", from desktop development, to the web. HTML has the FORM tag, but in ASP.NET, a web page is a WebForm. Instead of justing write HTML code into the HTTP stream (like CGI, ASP and PHP), using ASP.NET you can use and create controls like Labels, TextBoxes and ListView, and add event handlers (Postbacks) to then. And instead of rendering a window in a desktop, it will generate the HTML output which will be rendered by user's browser.
The ASP.NET architecture uses the .NET Framework as infrastucure. The .NET Framework is a managed runtime environment (like Java), providing a Virtual Machine with JIT and a class library. The .NET Framework class library have a lot of classes and makes it quicker and easier to develop your applications.
Web developers using ASP.NET can use the .NET Framework to make some tasks easier e.g. uploading files via a Web page is significantly easier using ASP.NET than Classic ASP (the name now given to ASP pages).
There are many choices of software to use for creating ASP.NET Web applications. These include:
ASP.NET 1.1 is the current version of ASP.NET. ASP.NET 2 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.
External links