7. Building Web Applications: ASP.NET

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Chapter 7. Building Web Applications: ASP.NET

Accessing software over the Web has become the norm. Most new enterprise applications offer at least the option of a browser interface, and many offer nothing else. Given this, an application platform that doesn't provide first-class support for building Web-based software is doomed to failure. And yet how we use software via the Web is changing. While communicating with a user through a browser is certainly important, Web services are also on the scene. The Web is expanding from a world driven solely by eyeballs to one that's also driven by applications.

Web-based applications are important

ASP.NET is the .NET Framework's primary foundation for building Web applications. Part of the .NET Framework class library, it supports creating both browser applications and Web services applications, and it relies on a common infrastructure for both. Given the popularity of Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET's predecessor, this technology is certain to be among the most widely used parts of the .NET Framework.

ASP.NET allows creating browser applications and Web services applications

Like everything else in the class library, ASP.NET is defined as a group of types contained in several namespaces. (As described later in this chapter, however, ASP.NET also provides an executable process for hosting its applications.) The root namespace for ASP.NET is System.Web, and immediately below it are several more namespaces. The most important of these are System.Web.UI, which contains the types used to build browser Web applications, and System.Web.Services, which contains the types used to build Web services applications. This division is central, so this chapter first describes how ASP.NET supports browser applications and then examines how the technology can be used to build Web services.

ASP.NET's types are contained in the System.Web namespace

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