Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

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ASP.NET and jQuery

by David Giard

Approximately ten years ago, Microsoft introduced ASP.NET — a framework for building web applications using the new .NET platform. ASP.NET was designed to assist developers to build, deploy, and maintain web pages and websites. ASP.NET integrates with Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and provides developers with a rich set of tools to develop dynamic web applications.

When it was introduced, this framework focused on Web Forms. Web Forms abstracted away many of the low-level complexities of HTML and HTTP, giving developers an experience similar to one used to build Windows Forms. By using Web Forms, developers could quickly create an interactive web page, even if they knew little about the underlying technologies of the web. This development experience was similar to the popular Visual Basic language, so it appealed to developers familiar with that language.

Like its predecessor Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET provides a developer with the ability to build web applications using a combination of code and markup.

Unlike the classic ASP, ASP.NET is built on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and uses the power of .NET. Because of this, ASP.NET can take advantage of CLR benefits, such as automatic garbage collection, a rich set of libraries, and a robust security model.

The latest version of ASP.NET includes enhancements to the ASP.NET Web Forms Framework and an updated version of the new ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. ...