ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Chapter 2. ASP.NET Applications

In the last chapter, we introduced the .NET platform, some of its most important concepts, and new features available in ASP.NET. In this chapter, we’ll look at the types of applications you can create with ASP.NET, discuss when you might want to use one type over another, explore the structure of ASP.NET applications, and look at the various file types that make up an ASP.NET application.

Application Types

In classic ASP, there was really only one type of application -- one in which a client accessed a page with the .asp extension and in which that page, either through embedded VBScript or JScript or through script in combination with components built on Microsoft’s COM standard, returned HTML to the browser to form the user interface with which the client would interact. Clients typically interacted with the application only through this user interface and did not have the option of creating their own alternative interface to the functionality exposed by the application.

ASP.NET provides an enhanced version of this type of application, which we’ll discuss in the next section. ASP.NET also introduces a new type of application, called a web service, which provides clients the ability to use functionality exposed by an application without being tied into that application’s user interface implementation.

ASP.NET Web Applications

The ASP.NET Web Application is the type of application most developers will work with on a regular basis. The terminology ...