What IS ASP .Net?

Beginners Introduction to ASP.NET

Introduction
ASP.NET is the new offering for Web developers from the Microsoft .It is not simply the next-generation of ASP; in fact, it is a completely re-engineered and enhanced technology that offers much, much more than traditional ASP and can increase productivity significantly.

Because it has evolved from ASP, ASP.NET looks very similar to its predecessor�but only at first sight. Some items look very familiar, and they remind us of ASP. But concepts like Web Forms, Web Services, or Server Controls gives ASP.NET the power to build real Web applications.
Looking Back : Active Server Pages (ASP)

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting technology. ASP is a technology that Microsoft created to ease the development of interactive Web applications. With ASP you can use client-side scripts as well as server-side scripts. Maybe you want to validate user input or access a database. ASP provides solutions for transaction processing and managing session state. Asp is one of the most successful language used in web development.
Problems with Traditional ASP

There are many problems with ASP if you think of needs for Today's powerful Web applications.

1. Interpreted and Loosely-Typed Code
ASP scripting code is usually written in languages such as JScript or VBScript. The script-execution engine that Active Server Pages relies on interprets code line by line, every time the page is called. In addition, although variables are supported, they are all loosely typed as variants and bound to particular types only when the code is run. Both these factors impede performance, and late binding of types makes it harder to catch errors when you are writing code.

2. Mixes layout (HTML) and logic (scripting code)
ASP files frequently combine script code with HTML. This results in ASP scripts that are lengthy, difficult to read, and switch frequently between code and HTML. The interspersion of HTML with ASP code is particularly problematic for larger web applications, where content must be kept separate from business logic.

3. Limited Development and Debugging Tools
Microsoft Visual InterDev, Macromedia Visual UltraDev, and other tools have attempted to increase the productivity of ASP programmers by providing graphical development environments. However, these tools never achieved the ease of use or the level of acceptance achieved by Microsoft Windows application development tools, such as Visual Basic or Microsoft Access. ASP developers still rely heavily or exclusively on Notepad.

Debugging is an unavoidable part of any software development process, and the debugging tools for ASP have been minimal. Most ASP programmers resort to embedding temporary Response. Write statements in their code to trace the progress of its execution.

4. No real state management
Session state is only maintained if the client browser supports cookies. Session state information can only be held by using the ASP Session object. And you have to implement additional code if you, for example, want to identify a user.

5. Update files only when server is down
If your Web application makes use of components, copying new files to your application should only be done when the Web server is stopped. Otherwise it is like pulling the rug from under your application's feet, because the components may be in use (and locked) and must be registered.

6. Obscure Configuration Settings
The configuration information for an ASP web application (such as session state and server timeouts) is stored in the IIS metabase. Because the metabase is stored in a proprietary format, it can only be modified on the server machine with utilities such as the Internet Service Manager. With limited support for programmatically manipulating or extracting these settings, it is often an arduous task to port an ASP application from one server to another.

ASP.NET (Active Server Pages) is server side scripting technology that enables scripts to be executed on the web server (IIS).The IIS is component of Windows Server like windows 2000 and XP Professional. The extension for Classic ASP is ".asp" but for ASP.Net the extension is ".ASPX". An ASP.NET Page can contain HTML, XML and scripts.
In simple web page transaction when a browser request a web page, the server in return the HTML file where as in ASP.NET case, the browser request for the ASP.NET page, this request goes to the web server, the web server will pass the this to the ASP.NET engine after the engine will parse the script in the ASP.NET page, convert it to the HTML page and send back to the client's browser

The latest is ASP.NET 2.0 that support new features and controls like
1). Different language support
2). Event Driven
3). Programmable Controls
4). User authentication and other controls
5). Easily deployable

The ASP.NET contains a large number of HTML controls; these controls can be easily managed by the scripts. As earlier mentioned it is event driven, means different events like Load, Click etc are handled by codes.
Another important thing is the complied codes, means at first request; the pages will be complied on the server and keep a cache in the memory. It will help in increased performance.
The configuration in ASP.NET can be done through plain text files. Above article will make you familiar with basic things of ASP.NET