An Empty Mind is always ready
for anything and open to everything.

For years, the Active Server Pages (ASP) technology was arguably the leading choice for web developers building dynamic web sites on Windows web servers, as it offered flexible yet powerful scripting capabilities. Early in 2002, Microsoft released a new technology for Internet development called ASP.NET. ASP.NET represents a leap forward from ASP both in its sophistication and the productivity gains it achieves for developers. It continues to offer flexibility in terms of language support, but rather than a range of simple scripting languages, several fully-fledged programming languages are now at the fingertips of ASP.NET developers. Development in ASP.NET requires not only an understanding of HTML and web design, but also a firm grasp of the concepts of object oriented programming and development.

ASP.NET is a server-side technology for developing web applications based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Let’s break that jargon-filled sentence down. ASP.NET is a server-side technology; that is, it runs on the web server. Most web designers start their careers learning client-side technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). When a web browser requests a web page created with only client-side technologies, the web server simply grabs the files that the browser (or client) requests and sends them down the line. The client is entirely responsible for reading the markup in those files and interpreting that markup to display the page on the screen. Server-side technologies, like ASP.NET, are different. Instead of being interpreted by the client, server-side code (for example, the code in an ASP.NET page) is interpreted by the web server. In the case of ASP.NET, the code in the page is
read by the server and used to generate HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that is then sent to the browser. Since the processing of the ASP.NET code occurs on the server, it’s called a server-side technology. As Figure 1.1 shows, the client only sees the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The server is entirely responsible for processing the server-side code.

 

 

Note the three roles involved in such a transaction:

USER:  Never forget that there’s a real person at the end (or beginning) of the line.
WEB CLIENT :This is the software program that the person uses to interact to the web application. The client is usually a web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
WEB SERVER: This is the software program located on the server. It processes requests made by the web client.