Windows Developer Power Tools

1.0 Introduction

ASP.NET redefined how Microsoft developers write web applications. Formerly, with Microsoft ASP 3.0 and its predecessors, web developers were forced to mix HTML markup with server-side code on the same page. This mixing of presentation and logic in the same code file quickly led to “spaghetti code” that was hard to maintain and even harder to debug.

ASP.NET gave web developers access to the entire .NET Framework and added ASP.NET controls to the existing collection of HTML ones. ASP.NET controls encapsulate the generation of HTML and enable the code-behind application model. Using the code-behind model, developers can cleanly separate their code from their HTML, making applications much easier to debug and maintain.

ASP.NET 1.1 brought in controls to cover the basics of web development and, more importantly, created a powerful and extensible framework for writing web applications. It included the following features:

• The ability to create your own custom controls that encapsulate common functionality and help prevent code duplication

• Hooks throughout the entire web request process that make it easy to intercept requests or responses using modules or HTTP handlers

• ViewState, which uses a hidden form field to persist the state of a form across page postbacks, making it easy to handle events on the server side

The latest release, ASP.NET 2.0, adds an impressive number of new controls and features to this framework, including:

• Master pages and themes, two technologies that ...