Page 21 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Unit 1: Making Sense of .NET and Anatomy of an ASP.NET Page

1.6 ASP in .NET Notes

This is the engine that hosts the web applications you create with .NET, and supports almost
any feature from the .NET class library. ASP.NET also includes a set of web-specific services,
like secure authentication and data storage.

ASP.NET takes an object-oriented programming approach to Web page execution. Every
element in an ASP.NET page is treated as an object and run on the server. An ASP.NET page
gets compiled into an intermediate language by a .NET Common Language Runtime compliant
compiler. Then a JIT compiler turns the intermediate code to native machine code, and that
machine code is eventually run on the processor. Because the code is run straight from the
processor; pages load much faster than classic ASP pages, where embedded VBScript or JScript
had to be continuously interpreted and cached. ASP.NET is used to create Web pages and Web
services and is an integral part of Microsoft’s .NET vision.
1.6.1 Many Faces of ASP.NET

With ASP.NET 3.5, Microsoft aims to persist its success by calming and attractive ASP.NET.
The good news is that Microsoft has not removed features, replaced functionality, or reversed
direction. Instead, almost all the changes add higher-level features that can make your
programming more productive.
All in all, there have been four major releases of ASP.NET:
• ASP.NET 1.0: This first release created the core ASP.NET platform and introduced a wide
range of essential features.
• ASP.NET 1.1: This second release added performance tune ups and bug fixes, but no new
features.
• ASP.NET 2.0: This third release piled on a huge set of new features, all of which were built
on top of the existing ASP.NET plumbing. The overall emphasis was to supply developers
with prebuilt goodies that they could use without writing much (if any) code. Some of
the new features included built in support for website navigation, a theming feature for
standardizing web page design, and an easier way to pull information out of a database.
• ASP.NET 3.5: This fourth release keeps the same basic engine as ASP.NET 2.0, but adds
a few frills and two more dramatic changes. The most significant enhancement is the
ASP.NET AJAX toolkit, which gives web developers better tools for creating highly
responsive web pages that incorporate rich effects usually seen in desktop applications
(such as drag and drop and auto complete). The other innovation is support for LINQ, a
set of language enhancements included with .NET 3.5 that allows you to search in memory
data in the same way that you query a database.
Microsoft used the .NET 3.0 names to release a set of new technologies, including Windows
Presentation Foundation (WPF), a platform for building slick Windows applications; Windows
Workflow Foundation (WF), a platform for modelling application logic using flowchart style
diagrams; and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), a platform for designing services
that can be called from other computers. However, .NET 3.0 did not include an updated version
of ASP.NET.

ASP.NET 1.0 was released on January 5, 2002 as part of version 1.0 of the
.NET Framework.

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