Page 9 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

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

1.1 Features of .NET Notes

The following features are:

Rich Functionality Out Of the Box
The .NET framework provides rich set of functionality out of the box. It contains hundreds of
lessons that provide assortment of functionality ready to use in your applications. This means
that as a developer you need not go into low level details of many operations such as file IO,
network communication and so on.

Easy Development of Web Applications
The ASP.NET is a technology accessible on .NET stage for developing dynamic and data driven
web applications. ASP.NET provides an event driven programming model (similar to Visual
Basic 6 that simplify development of web pages (now called as web forms) with complex user
interface. ASP.NET server controls provide advanced user interface elements (like calendar and
grids) that save lot of coding from programmer’s side.
OOPs Support
The advantages of Object Oriented programming are well known. .NET provides a fully object
oriented environment. The philosophy of .NET is “Object is mother of all.” Languages like
Visual Basic.NET now support many of the OO features that were lacking traditionally. Even
primitive types like integer and characters can be treated as objects something not available
even in OO languages like C++.

Multi-Language Support
Generally enterprises have varying skill sets. For example, a company might have people with
skills in Visual Basic, C++, and Java etc. It is an experience that whenever a new language or
environment is invented existing skills are outdated. This naturally increases cost of training and
learning curve. .NET provides something attractive in this area. It supports multiple languages.
This means that if you have skills in C++, you need not throw them but just mould them to suit
.NET environment. Currently four languages are available right out of the box namely Visual
Basic .NET, C# (pronounced as C-sharp), Jscript.NET and Managed C++ (a dialect of Visual
C++). There are many vendors that are working on developing language compilers for other
languages (20+ language compilers are already available). The beauty of multi-language support
lies in the fact that even though the syntax of each language is different, the basic capabilities
of each language remain at par with one another.
Multi-Device Support

Modern life style is increasingly embracing mobile and wireless devices such as PDAs, mobiles
and handheld PCs. .NET provides promising platform for programming such devices. .NET
Compact Framework and Mobile Internet Toolkit are step ahead in this direction.
Automatic memory management
While developing applications developers had to develop an eye on system resources like
memory. Memory leaks were major reason in failure of applications. .NET takes this worry away
from developer by handling memory on its own. The garbage collector takes care of freeing
unused objects at appropriate intervals.
Compatibility with COM and COM+

Before the preface of .NET, COM was the de-facto standard for componentized software
development. Companies have invested lot of money and efforts in developing COM components
and controls. The good news is you can still use COM components and ActiveX controls under

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