ASP.NET by Example

A Brief History of ASP

When Active Server Pages was first released in November of 1996, four years ago as this book is going to press, it provided an easy way to create dynamic Web pages. Although Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Perl were very popular at the time, ASP quickly gained popularity for four reasons. These included ease of data access, ease of page design, Component Object Model (COM) interoperability, and a relatively flat learning curve for many programmers already familiar with Visual Basic.

For more information about the origins of ASP, originally code-named Denali, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period96/Denali.htm.

First, if ASP had not been released with ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), it most likely would not ...