Introduction

With the advent of ASP.NET we see a shift from traditional scripting to the beginning of full-fledged programming online. VBScript isn t the only option anymore, as programmers can now employ the full power that lies behind both Visual Basic (VB) and C within their ASP.NET assemblies.

There is no denying the widespread acceptance that .NET received from the developer community. It s proven itself to be a well-developed framework with solid ideas on how the programming world should continue to change. The introduction of a software solution that enables anyone to code in any language that is compatible with the framework is groundbreaking to say the least.

In this chapter we will take a look at how Active Server Pages (ASP) itself began just a couple of years ago and how it has captivated programmers ever since. It has had some problems, of course, but the .NET architecture seems to have found solutions to many preexisting programming problems. There have also been changes with how ASP works with the server and client, to provide the user with the information that you want to provide.

Even though this is a stable beta, and many people are assuming already that what we are seeing within Beta 2 is basically the freeze for many features, it still has a couple of caveats, due to its beta nature. Learning from these problems within the framework can allow for preparation against it.

Learning from the History of ASP

You can trace the history of ASP...