Introduction
Microsoft launched ASP.NET, a framework for building dynamic websites more than 10 years ago. Since then, improved versions have been released — in 2003 (version 1.1), 2005 (version 2.0), 2008 (version 3.5), and most recently, version 4.0 in 2010. Not long after the release of version 4.0, a series of blog posts appeared from Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President responsible for the Developer Division (which includes ASP.NET). Each of them caused a lot of interest within the ASP.NET development community. The first post announced the launch of IIS Express — a lightweight web server specifically designed to aid in the web application development process. The second blog post concerned the imminent release of a new version of the SQL Server Compact Edition database which could be deployed within a web hosting environment easily. The third post in the series heralded the introduction of a new “View Engine” for ASP.NET, together with a new programming syntax — Razor. The ASP.NET community was giddy with the pace of these announcements. Then along came the final announcement, bringing all these new initiatives together into a totally new web development “stack” — WebMatrix, as well as a new development paradigm leveraging the Razor syntax — Web Pages.
Learning ASP.NET had suddenly got very much easier than it was before.
Until the launch of Web Pages, ASP.NET came in two flavors: Web Forms and MVC. Web Forms has proven pretty popular, and offers a development ...
