You've probably heard the word ASP.net fairly often these days, especially on developer sites and news. This article will explain what the fuss is all about. 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. To use ASP.NET hosting you should have installed .NET Framework on the server. 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 is 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 computer’s memory after it has been initially extracted.

Class Library

ASP.NET includes an enormous class library which was built by Microsoft. Because this class library is so large, it encapsulates a a huge number of common functions. For example, if you wanted to retrieve data from a database and display that data in a simple grid control through classic ASP, then you'd have to write quite a lot of code.

In ASP.NET, you don't write any code to display the data: you just write the code to bind the data to an object called a DataGrid (which can be done in just a couple of lines). Then, you just have to create a reference on your page to where that DataGrid should go. The DataGrid will be rendered as a table, and will contain all of the data extracted from the database.

Microsoft has created an amazingly well designed MSDN library for ASP.NET and all of the other .NET languages. It includes a full class library containing information and examples on every class, function, method, and property accessible through ASP.NET.

The MSDN library also includes some tutorials and examples to get you started. It may take you a while to get used to the format and layout of the MSDN ASP.NET library, however, once you do, you will find it's an invaluable resource to aid you throughout your ASP.NET learning experience. The .NET MSDN library can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/