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, applications and services. The name stands for Active Server Pages Network Enabled Technologies.
ASP.NET was first announced to the public under the codename ASP+, and is a re-implementation of Microsoft's Active Server Pages technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime, 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.
In 2016, Microsoft released ASP.NET Core as ASP.NET's successor. This new version is a re-implementation of ASP.NET as a modular web framework, together with other frameworks like Entity Framework. The new framework uses the new open-source.NET Compiler Platform and is cross platform. ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, and ASP.NET Web Pages have merged into a unified MVC 6.

Programming models

ASP.NET supports a number of programming models for building web applications:
  • ASP.NET Web Forms – A framework for building modular pages out of components, with UI events being processed server-side. This framework is not included in the ASP.NET Core versions; it only works in the "classic" ASP.NET, on Windows.
  • ASP.NET MVC – allows building web pages using the model–view–controller design pattern.
  • ASP.NET Web Pages – A lightweight syntax for adding dynamic code and data access directly inside HTML markup.
  • ASP.NET Web API – A framework for building Web APIs on top of the.NET Framework.
  • ASP.NET WebHooks – Implements the Webhook pattern for subscribing to and publishing events via HTTP.
  • SignalR – A real-time communications framework for bi-directional communication between client and server.
Other ASP.NET extensions include:
  • ASP.NET Handler – Components that implement the System.Web.IHttpHandler interface. Unlike ASP.NET Pages, they have no HTML-markup file, no events and other supporting. All they have is a code-file that writes some data to the server HTTP response. HTTP handlers are similar to ISAPI extensions.
  • ASP.NET AJAX – An extension with both client-side as well as server-side components for writing ASP.NET pages that incorporate Ajax functionality.
  • ASP.NET Dynamic Data – A scaffolding extension to build data driven web applications.

    IIS integrated pipeline

On IIS 6.0 and lower, pages written using different versions of the ASP framework cannot share session state without the use of third-party libraries. This does not apply to ASP.NET and ASP applications running side by side on IIS 7. With IIS 7.0, modules may be run in an integrated pipeline that allows modules written in any language to be executed for any request.

Third-party frameworks

It is not essential to use the standard Web forms development model when developing with ASP.NET. Noteworthy frameworks designed for the platform include:
ASP.NET's release history tightly correlates with the.NET Framework releases:

Other implementations

The Mono Project supports "everything in.NET 4.7 except WPF, WWF, and with limited WCF and limited ASP.NET async stack." ASP.NET can be run with Mono using one of three options: Apache hosting using the mod_mono module, FastCGI hosting, and XSP.