.NET and COM Interoperability Handbook, The

The ASP.NET Web Services Infrastructure

ASP.NET is completely rearchitectured from the ISAPI model for server-side programming using IIS and HTTP. The ISAPI model allowed you to create your own DLLs that would receive HTTP requests, could perform custom processing, and return a response. ASP (the predecessor to ASP.NET) was implemented as an ISAPI DLL that received requests from files with a .asp extension, compiled the script contained in these pages, and returned the result of the script, along with any surrounding HTML. The architecture of ASP.NET is far more flexible. It allows you all the power of ISAPI, with a much simpler programming model and the ability to support both Web Forms and Web services. At a high level, the ASP.NET architecture ...