ASP

        ASP.NET is a Web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic Web sites, Web applications and Web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. The ASP.NET SOAP extension framework allows ASP.NET components to process SOAP messages.

After four years of development, and a series of beta releases in 2000 and 2001, ASP.NET 1.0 was released on January 5, 2002 as part of version 1.0 of the .NET Framework. Even prior to the release, dozens of books had been written about ASP.NET, and Microsoft promoted it heavily as part of its platform for Web services. Scott Guthrie became the product unit manager for ASP.NET, and development continued apace, with version being released on April 24, 2003 as a part of Windows Server 2003. This release focused on improving ASP.NET's support for mobile devices.

Characteristics

Pages

ASP.NET Web pages, known officially as Web Forms, are the main building block for application development. Web forms are contained in files with an ".aspx" extension; these files typically contain static (X)HTML markup, as well as markup defining server-side Web Controls and User Controls where the developers place all the rc content for the Web page

Directives

A directive is special instructions on how ASP.NET should process the page. The most common directive is <%@ Page %> which can specify many attributes used by the ASP.NET page parser and compiler.

In this case, the Page_Load() method is called every time the ASPX page is requested. The programmer can implement event handlers at several stages of the page execution process to perform processing.

User controls

User controls are encapsulations of sections of pages which are registered and used as controls in ASP.NET.

Custom controls

Programmers can also build custom controls for ASP.NET applications. Unlike user controls, these controls do not have an ASCX markup file, having all their code compiled into a dynamic link library (DLL) file. Such custom controls can be used across multiple Web applications and Visual Studio projects.

Rendering technique

ASP.NET uses a visited composites rendering technique. During compilation, the template (.aspx) file is compiled into initialization code which builds a control tree (the composite) representing the original template.

Application

Application state is held by a collection of shared user-defined variables. These are set and initialized when the Application_OnStart event fires on the loading of the first instance of the application and are available until the last instance exits. Application state variables are accessed using the Applications collection, which provides a wrapper for the application state. Application state variables are identified by name.