Summary

Chapter 6

ASP.NET

ASP.NET, the next generation of the Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) platform, is known for the ease with which it allows you to develop Web applications. It provides a layer of abstraction that lets you focus on solving business problems instead of developing the underlying plumbing, which can greatly increase your productivity. This model has been extended beyond Web Forms to include Web services.

ASP.NET is also popular because it offers a rich set of services that you can leverage when you build applications. With the introduction of ASP.NET, the platform facilitates the rapid creation and consumption of Web services. ASP.NET abstracts the underlying Web services protocols such as SOAP, WSDL, and HTTP away from the developer. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, Web services that expose simple interfaces require little, if any, knowledge of the underlying protocols.

Sometimes you need to exercise a high degree of control over the serialization of the SOAP messages and the format of the WSDL document used to describe the Web service. Fortunately, ASP.NET provides the necessary hooks that allow you to control practically every aspect of the implementation of a Web service. In this chapter, I discuss the hooks ASP.NET provides as well as examples of when to use them.

Web application developers have come to rely on services provided by the ASP platform, such as state management and security. These services have been significantly improved in ASP.NET and can be leveraged to create robust Web services. Additional services such as automatic generation of documentation have also been introduced specifically for Web services.

For a version 1 product, ASP.NET is a remarkably feature-rich and solid development platform. However, as with any V1 product, ASP.NET has some quirks. In this chapter, I talk about many of them and show you how to work through them.