What is ASP.net?

This tutorial written and contributed by Mitchell

Harper. Please see footnote for more info.

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. 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 computers 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://http://www.zjjv.com///net/

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!!";




</script>

The VB.NET version:




Sub Page_Load(S As Object, E As EventArgs) myLabel.Text = "Hello world!!"




End Sub




</script>

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:

<head>




<title>"Hello World" example!</title>




</head>




<body>




<asp:Label id="myLabel" runat="server" />




</body>




</html>

Where to get .NET?

You can get ASP.net at its homepate:

ASP.NET homepage.

About Mitchell Harper

Mitchell is the lead developer for

Interspire. Interspire develop re-brandable Internet software and

tools to help web developers increase their customer base and make more

revenue. Their products include

ActiveKB,

DevEdit,

SendStudio,

WebEditPlatinum.