ASP.NET (Active Server Pages .NET) is a free web platform created by Microsoft experts to design interactive web applications that run on the .NET platform.
This framework provides many tools for developing web applications, including:
- standalone web pages;
- web services;
- state management;
- authentication;
- authorization;
- caching;
- error handling and much more.
History of ASP.NET
The ASP.NET platform originated at the dawn of the Internet – in the 1990s. The first web pages were purely informative and therefore static. But quite quickly there was a need to add interactive elements to them. For example, forms for sending data to the server, chat rooms or shopping carts.
Then Microsoft began to develop tools for designing dynamic web pages. As a result, the company released the first version of Active Server Pages (ASP) in 1996. It was a server-side platform for creating dynamic Web pages in the VBScript or JScript scripting language.
At first, the first version of ASP was quite popular, but after a few years it became outdated and no longer met the modern (at that time) requirements of web development. Therefore, in 2000 Microsoft started working on a new version of the technology. Work on the next release of ASP began with renaming the project to ASP+.
ASP+ came out faster and more scalable, and it fixed problems related to security, state management, and deployment.
But the main innovation in ASP+ was the support of the C# language, introduced by Microsoft in 2000. Moreover, C# has become the main tool for creating web applications on the .NET platform.
In 2002, ASP.NET was released with the .NET Framework 1.0 platform. It provided developers with a powerful toolkit, including new tools such as:
- ASP.NET Web Forms;
- ASP.NET MVC;
- ASP.NET Web API.
ASP.NET became popular and sought after among web developers because it was flexible. It allowed the creation of complex Web applications that could handle large amounts of data and work with a variety of external sources, including databases.
Building on the ASP.NET project, in 2016 Microsoft released a new version of the platform called ASP.NET Core. The developers provided better performance, smaller application size, and compatibility with different operating systems including Linux and macOS.
One of the key changes in ASP.NET Core is a reworking of the architecture and underlying concepts. Instead of using Application Domain, ASP.NET Core uses namespaces and assemblies to organize and manage application code.
In addition, ASP.NET Core provides integrated support for building microservice applications and APIs. This opens the door for developers to design scalable applications.
ASP.NET working principle
- first comes the request from the client;
- when the user sends a request to the web server, ASP.NET accepts this request and starts processing it;
- there is a chain of handlers that can perform different tasks, for example, checking authorization or processing form data;
- ASP.NET then executes code on the server that can generate HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other data to send back to the client;
- after generating the pages ASP.NET sends it back to the client as a response to its request.
Next, the platform maintains state between requests and responses, such as the use of cookies or sessions. State can be used, for example, to store user information to avoid re-authenticating each time a request is made.