ASP.NET is a 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 just writing 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 them. 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 infrastructure. The .NET Framework is a managed runtime environment (like Java), providing a virtual machine with JIT and a class library. Using the numerous .NET classes, can cut down on development time.
Web developers using ASP.NET can use the .NET Framework to make some tasks easier. For example, programming a feature allowing files to be uploaded via a web page, is significantly easier using ASP.NET than Classic ASP (the name now given to ASP pages).
There are several software packages available for developing ASP.NET applications:
- Visual Studio .NET
- Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
- Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004
- ASP.NET Web Matrix
The current version is 1.1. 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.