.Net Framework Essentials

Chapter 7. Web Forms

This chapter introduces the next technology for providing dynamic and interactive web pages. ASP.NET takes ASP a step further to simplify the development process of web pages and enhance scalability of web applications. First, we review the conventional way of developing web applications using ASP to uncover some of the pitfalls that ASP.NET overcomes. We then discuss the benefits of ASP.NET and provide a high-level survey of the classes in the ASP.NET, such as control and page, as well as the complete syntax of ASP.NET Web Forms. To wrap up the chapter, we discuss the many aspects of ASP.NET development: how ASP.NET supports Web Services development, how to use custom server controls, and how session management has been improved to provide more scalable web solutions.

ASP

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting technology enabling dynamic web pages. An ASP page contains HTML markup and server-side scripts that dynamically generate HTML content. The server-side scripts run when a request for the ASP page arrives at the web server. Inputs to the ASP page come from the client browsers through HTTP POST and GET methods. ASP provides an object model to simplify developers’ tasks. Besides using objects from the ASP object model, such as Application, Server, Request, Response, and Session, developers can also use any other COM components available on the server.

If you’ve already been developing web applications using ASP, you probably agree ...