| Today you took a look at the fundamental concepts of the .NET framework and ASP.NET. After today, you should begin to see just how powerful ASP.NET is, and how it makes Web development much more efficient and robust. To process ASP.NET pages, you need a Web server (such as Internet Information Server) and the .NET Framework SDK. These provide the tools and structure to execute ASP.NET pages. ASP.NET must be processed through a Web server or it won't work. The .NET Framework is set of blueprints and objects. Applications developed within this framework are compiled into Microsoft Intermediate Language, and they produce metadata that describes them. The Common Language Runtime compiles the MSIL into machine code and uses the metadata to help execute the applications. Today you examined some typical ASP.NET pages. You learned about the most common parts of an ASP.NET page, including the <%@ Page %> directive, code declaration and render blocks, and Web forms. These all provide the foundation for building complex ASP.NET pages. Finally, you compared ASP.NET to its predecessor, Active Server Pages. ASP.NET provides a much better framework for building Web applications and is easier and more intuitive to use. It also provides many more programmatic enhancements. However, many classic ASP programming concepts still apply to ASP.NET, so ASP developers should have few problems moving to the ASP.NET. The most important point to take away from today's lesson is that ASP.NET pages are a server technology that enables you to build dynamic Web pages. Tomorrow, you'll develop your first ASP.NET application and learn why everything works the way it does. You'll also take a closer look at the .NET Framework and how it works together with ASP.NET. But for now, get some sleep and have sweet dreams of ASP.NET pages! | 
