What is ASP.NET?
ASP.NET is not just the next version of ASP; it is the next era
of web development. ASP.NET allows you to use a full featured
programming language such as C# (pronounced C-Sharp) or VB.NET
to build web applications easily.
-------------------------- ASP.NET still renders HTML
-------------------------- Unfortunately, the Internet still has
bandwidth limitations and not every person is running the same
web browser.
These issues make it necessary to stick with HTML as our mark-up
language of choice. This means that web pages won't look quite
as amazing as a fully fledged application running under Windows,
but with a bit of skill and creative flair, you can make some
rather amazing web applications with ASP.NET.
ASP.NET processes all code on the server (in a similar way to a
normal application). When the ASP.NET code has been processed,
the server returns the resultant HTML to the client. If the
client supports JavaScript, then the server will use it to make
the clients browser experience quicker and easier. Even with
HTML being the limiting factor here, ASP.NET still manages to
bring true OOP (Object Oriented Programming) to the Internet.
-------------------------- OOP on the Internet
-------------------------- Object Oriented Programming makes it
possible to build extremely large applications, while still
keeping your code clean and structured. Now with ASP.NET, we can
do the same on the web. Traditional ASP uses HTML and VBScript
(or Jscript) to process and render pages, but because VBScript
is a scripting language, you were forced to write spaghetti code
(VBScript was entwined in the HTML and ended up rather messy in
larger applications).
ASP.NET separates code from display, and you can even have pages
with no ASP.NET code in them at all. By adding references in
your HTML (called controls), you can tell ASP.NET that you want
a button here, some text there, and then in your code, you can
manipulate what these controls look like, what they display, how
big they are, etc.
Controls can do more than just display information. You can add
events to controls, so that when a visitor clicks on a button,
for example, ASP.NET executes a function of your choice.
-------------------------- Web Services
-------------------------- One great feature of ASP.NET are Web
Services. Web services mean that you can literally have several
pieces of your application on different servers all around the
world, and the entire application will work perfectly and
seamlessly. Web services can even work with normal .NET Windows
applications.
For example: A lot of people would like to have a stock ticker
on their web site, but not many people want to manually type in
all changes to the prices. If one company (a stock broker)
creates a web service and updates the stock prices periodically,
then all of those people wanting the prices can use this web
service to log in, run a function which grabs the current price
for a chosen company, and return it. Web services can be used
for so many things: news, currency exchange, login
verification.. the ways in which they can be used are limited to
your imagination!
-------------------------- Great XML Support
-------------------------- ASP.NET makes it simple to use XML
for data storage, configuration and manipulation. The tools
which are built into ASP.NET for working with XML are very easy
to use. XML is excellent for storing information that rarely
changes, because you can just cache that information in the
computers memory after it has been initially extracted.
-------------------------- .NET is still in Beta development
-------------------------- Microsoft is still working on the
entire .NET framework, however you can still download the Beta 2
version (which works just fine... I'm yet to come across any
major bugs) from the ASP.NET homepage. The final release of .NET
is scheduled for February 18th, 2002.
-------------------------- Complete Compatibility
-------------------------- One of the most important goals of
.NET was to allow developers to write an ASP.NET application
using multiple programming languages. As long as each ASP.NET
page contains only one programming language, you can mix and
match different pages using different languages and they will
work together seamlessly. This means you can now have a team of
developers with half programming in C#, and the other half in
VB.NET, with no need to worry about language incompatibilities,
etc.
A cool little side-affect of all this is that all the
programming languages look very similar, and differ only by
their language syntax.
Take the following code snippets for example. They both do
exactly the same thing but the first is written in C#, and the
second in VB.NET.
The C# version: void Page_Load(Object S, EventArgs E) {
myLabel.Text = "Hello world!!";
The VB.NET version: Sub Page_Load(S As Object, E As EventArgs)
myLabel.Text = "Hello world!!" End Sub
If you take either of the code examples shown above and add the
following HTML to them, then they would both run perfectly
inside of an ASP.NET page:
"Hello World" example!< itle>