Introduction

Right from its initial release as a preview technology, Microsoft ASP.NET has been a huge success. For those of us developing web sites using Microsoft technologies ASP.NET provides a rich programming model, allowing sites to be easily constructed . There's been a lot of talk about ASP.NET since it's release, but ignoring all the hype and press, .NET really is a product for developers, providing a great foundation for building all types of applications.

Active Server Pages ( ASP ) has been the leading web development tool from Microsoft, even though it is still a relatively young product. Its success is due to its ease of use and flexibility, providing a simple way to create dynamic web sites. This success though hasn't come without problems, many of them simply because ASP has outgrown its feature set. It was designed to work with the underlying architecture of COM, which in itself has limiting features.

ASP.NET is part of the whole .NET framework, built on top of the Common Language Runtime (also known as the CLR )a rich and flexible architecture, designed not just to cater for the needs of developers today, but to allow for the long future we have ahead of us. What you might not realize is that, unlike previous updates of ASP, ASP.NET is very much more than just an upgrade of existing technologyit is the gateway to a whole new era of web development. This book will open the door to that gateway.

A New Kind of ASP

What does 'A New Kind of ASP' mean for the developer? After all, many products are hyped up as a major breakthrough , or revolutionary , but are in fact just point upgrades. ASP.NET isn't like that, and has been written from the ground up to provide a rich and flexible environment for developing Internet applications. Not only does it provide a host of new features, but it also changes the whole way in which you need to think about designing web-based applications.

Most of these changes come about because the architecture of ASP.NET is now much more modularized and based on the principles of components . Every page becomes a programmatically accessible, fully compiled object, and takes advantage of techniques like object-oriented design , just-in-time compilation , and dynamic caching . At the same time, the backward-compatible nature of ASP.NET means that existing pages and applications are still processed in the old way, so there is no sudden migration needed.

One of the major goals of ASP.NET is a huge improvement in the way that applications can be installed, configured, and updated. Components no longer have to be registered on the web server, and a whole application can be moved from one server to another just by using file copy commands, FTP, or specialized applications like the FrontPage Server Extensions.