ASP.NET 2.0 Illustrated

15. Using the Framework Classes

Most of this book so far has concentrated, quite correctly, on the classes in the System.Web and associated namespaces of the .NET Framework. This is what you would expect, because it is here that the classes implementing ASP.NET reside. However, .NET provides a rich environment of managed code objects that you can use from code in your ASP.NET pages.

This makes many tasks much easier than in previous (and other) environments where you have to instantiate external components to be able to step outside the bounds of the intrinsic language capabilities. For example, in versions of ASP prior to ASP.NET, you often had to resort to registering COM objects of various kinds and then instantiating them within the process ...