In this tutorial we will introduce the new technology for building websites. This new technology is known as ASP.Net. ASP.Net allows the developer to build applications faster. This is achieved due to the fast that ASP.Net makes use of the rich class libraries provided by Microsoft. net framework.
Asp, which is now more commonly known as Classic Asp was used extensively in 1990's. The idea of creating dynamic pages and linking them with database was the main purpose of classic Asp. Asp used html controls for user interaction. Apart from the good features available in Asp programming, it also lacks in some of the major areas. These areas include clean coding as asp pages were incline pages and all the business logic as well as the interface was coded in a single page. This produces many problem when the code had to be updated or modified. Asp pages also lacked performance and scalability which were fixed in ASP.Net. Lets see what ASP.Net technology has to offer a developer to build dynamic pages much faster.
ASP.Net Web Applications:
ASP.Net is based on the .NET framework for building web applications. Since ASP.Net is a part of the Microsoft. NET Framework it has the ability to take advantage of rich class libraries provided by Microsoft. The question is that why should one use ASP.Net and not use classic asp or any other web programming technology. Here are some of the features of ASP.Net that makes it the best web application technology.
Use of Controls:
ASP.Net provides the developer with several controls to perform basic as well as advanced operations. Controls provided in ASP.Net falls under HTML Controls, HTML Server Controls and Web Server Controls.
Html controls are the basic controls that are executed on the client machine. These controls include textbox, label , image etc. A simple example of html control can be given by the following code which renders an image.
As you see HTML controls are very easy to use but they don't provide much features. Microsoft decided to introduce HTML Server controls which extends the functionality of simple HTML Controls.
HTML Server Controls:
HTML Server Controls looks exactly like the HTML Controls with one difference that they are executed on the server rather than the client. A simple example of HTML Server controls is given below:
<img src = "imagepath" runat="server">
As you can see that the image tag or control looks exactly like the one that we have previously discussed. But it has an additional attribute which is runat. The runat attribute denotes that this is a HTML Server Control and will be executed on the Server rather than the client.
Note: src attribute in the image tag denotes the path of the image it can be "C:\MyDirectory\myImage.jpg"
Web Server Controls
Web Server Controls are the most advanced controls in ASP.Net. Each control comes with tons of features that allows the developer to complete the task in less time. Web Server Controls are executed on the Server. Web Server Controls include datagrid control, datalist control, calendar control and many many more.
When dealing with different types of controls one must always remember that when to use which control. If the control will only act as a static entity than you should always use HTML Controls. If the control will be dynamic you should use Web Server Controls.
ASP.Net also introduces caching features which increases the performance of the application. Caching allows the developer to save the recently used data in a cache variable so that if does not have to spend any time looking for it in the future when anyone requests it.
ASP.Net pages can be made in variety of tools. The most basic editor is notepad or WordPad. To make the development faster Microsoft has introduced Visual Studio development tool which lets the developer build enterprise applications in less time. There are many free tools available to build ASP.Net application one of them is "WebMatrix" which can be downloaded from http://www.asp.net
ASP.Net Web Services:
Web Services has change the way we develop applications. Sometimes its hard to grasp the idea behind the web service so I will try to make it as simple as possible. A web service is not a whole application, its a part or a component of a larger application. The basic purpose of the web service is to create a link/bridge between two different platforms and exchange data. This data is exchanged in the form of XML. XML is nothing but text which is in structured form that is why it's recognized by all platforms.
Developing web services is not any different than developing web applications. You can easily create a web service with the same knowledge you have for ASP.Net applications.