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-------------------------- 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 computers memory after it has been initially extracted.
-------------------------- .NET is still in Beta development -------------------------- Microsoft is still working on entire .NET framework, however you can still download Beta 2 version (which works just fine... I'm yet to come across any major bugs) from ASP.NET homepage. The final release of .NET is scheduled for February 18th, 2002.
-------------------------- Complete Compatibility -------------------------- One of 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 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 programming languages look very similar, and differ only by their language syntax.
Take following code snippets for example. They both do exactly same thing but first is written in C#, and second in VB.NET.
The C# version: void Page_Load(Object S, EventArgs E) { myLabel.Text = "Hello world!!";
The VB.NET version: Sub Page_Load(S As Object, E As EventArgs) myLabel.Text = "Hello world!!" End Sub
If you take either of code examples shown above and add following HTML to them, then they would both run perfectly inside of an ASP.NET page:
"Hello World" example!< itle>