Professional ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a server-side Web application framework designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. The ASP.NET SOAP extension framework allows ASP.NET components to process SOAP messages.

After four years of development, and a series of beta releases in 2000 and 2001, ASP.NET 1.0 was released on January 5, 2002 as part of version 1.0 of the .NET Framework. Even prior to the release, dozens of books had been written about ASP.NET,and Microsoft promoted it heavily as part of its platform for Web services. Scott Guthrie became the product unit manager for ASP.NET, and development continued apace, with version 1.1 being released on April 24, 2003 as a part of Windows Server 2003. This release focused on improving ASP.NET's support for mobile devices.

ASP.NET Web pages, known officially as Web Forms, are the main building blocks for application development. Web forms are contained in files with a ".aspx" extension; these files typically contain static (X)HTML markup, as well as markup defining server-side Web Controls and User Controls where the developers place all the rc content for the Web page. Additionally, dynamic code which runs on the server can be placed in a page within a block <% -- dynamic code -- %>, which is similar to other Web development technologies such as PHP, JSP, and ASP. With ASP.NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft introduced a new code-behind model which allows static text to remain on the .aspx page, while dynamic code remains in an .aspx.vb or .aspx.cs or .aspx.fs file (depending on the programming language used).

ASP.NET is about making you as productive as possible when building fast and secure web applications. Each release of ASP.NET gets better and removes a lot of the tedious code that you previously needed to put in place, making common ASP.NET tasks easier. With this book, an unparalleled team of authors walks you through the full breadth of ASP.NET and the new and exciting capabilities of ASP.NET 4. The authors also show you how to maximize the abundance of features that ASP.NET offers to make your development process smoother and more efficient.

Download Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB