16.0 Introduction

ASP.NET represents a significant leap forward for the Web because it transforms the simple Web page into a Web application. ASP.NET's predecessor, Active Server Pages (ASP), could process a Web page server side using a special tag-based notation to interact with a database without having to push this database across the wire to a connected client. ASP.NET still follows this convention, but its roots within ASP stop there because radical changes have occurred with the availability of the .NET Framework. The most notable addition is the ability to place a Web application's logic into the main unit of the .NET deployment model, an assembly. Whereas ASP used an interjected script within a Web page to manipulate the Web document, ASP.NET offers a tremendous advantage in performance and flexibility because the Web page, with help from the .NET Framework, accesses code within compiled binaries written in any .NET language the developer chooses. Additionally, creating a Web application is significantly easier than with ASP because it allows for better separation of the presentation from the logic designed to control the presentation.

This chapter looks at various facets of ASP.NET. You start by creating a simple Web application and learn how to use the various controls for presentation. The methods are so strikingly similar to those in the construction of Windows Forms that ASP.NET pages are also known as Web Forms. Later in the chapter, you'll see how to integrate the concepts discussed in Chapter 14, "ADO.NET," to bind data to certain Web Forms controls as well as how to create your own controls. The chapter ends by looking at how to increase performance through caching and how to create your own Web server to host ASP.NET Web pages.