ASP.WHAT? | ASP.NET for Web Designers

A question that may be looming in your mind and may be part of the reason you bought this book is "What is ASP.NET?" This is a good question considering it is important to understand what you are learning about before you learn it.

Some people may believe that it is a new programming language. Others may think it is another attempt of Microsoft's to dominate and rule the world. (Insert sinister music and image of evil-looking man wringing his hands together.)

In reality, ASP.NET is truly a new paradigm, or in other words, a new way of thinking when it comes to creating web applications.

To give you a better grasp of what I'm saying, we need to take a look back into the mysterious world of the web, where souls are gained and lost and the hearts of men and children…oh, sorry. I'm getting carried away again.

What we must do is look over the progression of the web and how we got to where we are today and examine the problems this created.

Back in the olden days, the Internet was used as a means of trading text-based documents within different medical, scientific, and collegiate circles. There was a need for a language to control this, and hence HTML was born.

Now, let's shoot forward to the early 1990s when the World Wide Web began to demand that this language take on traits that it didn't possess. These functions were things like interactivity, moving and flashing images, and from that languages such as JavaScript became a popular addition to web site design. JavaScript in this form ran on the client's machine enabled by the browser's capability to execute JavaScript function.

Next was the demand for dynamic data integration or database-driven web sites, and from that languages such as CGI, Active Server Pages, ColdFusion, Java Server Pages, and PHP were born. These technologies ran on the server, which enabled dynamic and personalized data to be delivered to the client's browser.

All these languages solved problems presented by the demands and needs that shaped web design and web applications. But with these solutions came new problems problems that were associated with the intermingling of languages and the nature of how a web server had to deliver this data.

My firm used to program applications in Active Server Page technology, the predecessor of ASP.NET. In using this technology we found ourselves programming in seven different languages when we created applications for our clients. The code from these languages was all intertwined. In other words, one line of code would contain HTML, with the next containing a combination of HTML and JavaScript, and the next containing Active Server Page code.

And on and on the intermingling of code went. As an application grew, so did the confusion within our development teams and its different members about which code was doing what, in who knows what language. Are you beginning to see the problem?

This is just the way it was for a web development company. We learned to deal with it and put into place some systems to help us deal with these types of complications when designing web sites.

Microsoft had some different ideas, as they always do. In early 1998 a few people within Microsoft began to examine the pros and cons of its Active Server Page technology. They noted the powerful applications that could be built with the technology, but also saw many of the problems that I have previously stated and many more that I haven't.

They began to open up a debate about how to resolve these issues and build on the power of ASP's core strengths, and ASP.NET was born. What emerged was a completely new way of addressing web development when it comes to dynamic function and data integration. ASP.NET is only part of a much bigger initiative called the .NET Framework.

Note

Don't be intimidated by terms like "Framework" that are used when describing .NET. These are just fancy programmer words for very practical things. Throughout the book I will help you to decipher this "programmer speak" with easy-to-understand examples. For instance, the word "Framework" can be represented with a word like "skeleton." It's the supporting structure on which .NET applications and services are built.

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