ASP.NET is not just
next version of ASP; it is 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, Internet still has bandwidth limitations and not every person is running 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 server (in a similar way to a normal application). When ASP.NET code has been processed, server returns resultant HTML to client. If client supports JavaScript, then server will use it to make clients browser experience quicker and easier. Even with HTML being limiting factor here, ASP.NET still manages to bring true OOP (Object Oriented Programming) to Internet.
-------------------------- OOP on 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 same on 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 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 are Web Services. Web services mean that you can literally have several pieces of your application on different servers all around world, and 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 prices. If one company (a stock broker) creates a web service and updates stock prices periodically, then all of those people wanting prices can use this web service to log in, run a function which grabs current price for a chosen company, and return it. Web services can be used for so many things: news, currency exchange, login verification.. ways in which they can be used are limited to your imagination!
