ASP.NET: Understanding Its Real Meaning

The promise of Microsoft’s ASP.NET is that "writing dynamic, high-performance Web applications has never been easier." That sure sounds good, doesn’t it? But for many non-developer professionals who are involved in one way or another with the Web development process, the devil is in the details of how this is achieved. So here’s a look at how some of the developer jargon translates into everyday language.

Microsoft says, "ASP.NET is a set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework for building Web applications and XML Web Services. ASP.NET pages execute on the server and generate markup such as HTML, WML or XML that is sent to a desktop or mobile browser. ASP.NET pages use a compiled, event-driven programming model that improves performance and enables the separation of application logic and user interface. ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET XML Web Services files contain server-side logic (as opposed to client side logic) written in Visual Basic .NET, C# .NET, or any .NET compatible language. Web applications and XML Web Services take advantage of the features of the common language runtime, such as type safety, inheritance, language interoperability, versioning, and integrated security."

Translation: ASP.NET is software built on a reliable programming model that runs on the server-side to more quickly display Web pages to your browser. The software can be programmed using a coding language your developer is bound to already know.

Now, let’s drill this down a little bit farther....

Microsoft says, "ASP.NET server controls enable an HTML-like style of declarative programming that lets you build great pages with far less code than with classic ASP. Displaying data, validating user input, and uploading files are all amazingly easy. Best of all, ASP.NET pages work in all browsers -- including Netscape, Opera, AOL, and Internet Explorer."

Translation: Writing less code takes your developer less time, which saves you money! And your Web site should work perfectly no matter whose computer you view it on.

Microsoft says, "ASP.NET lets you leverage your current programming language skills. Unlike classic ASP, which supports only interpreted VBScript and JScript, ASP.NET now supports more than 25 .NET languages (including built-in support for VB.NET, C#, and JScript.NET -- no tool required), giving you unprecedented flexibility in your choice of language."

Translation: ASP.NET gives you unprecedented flexibility in your choice of developers!

Microsoft says, "Application features that used to be hard to implement, or required a 3rd-party component, can now be added in just a few lines of code using the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework offers over 4500 classes that encapsulate rich functionality like XML, data access, file upload, regular expressions, image generation, performance monitoring and logging, transactions, message queuing, SMTP mail, and much more!"

Translation: Human beings solve complex problems by breaking them down into smaller tasks that are manageable. In programming, these smaller tasks are called "objects" (thus the term Object Oriented -- or OO -- language). A "class" is a recipe of code to achieve an "object." So, the .NET framework is really a cookbook for developers with over 4500 recipes of code that can be strung together to solve your larger complex coding needs without reinventing the recipes from scratch every time.

Microsoft says, "ASP.NET output caching can dramatically improve the performance and scalability of your application. When output caching is enabled on a page, ASP.NET executes the page just once, and saves the result in memory in addition to sending it to the user. When another user requests the same page, ASP.NET serves the cached result from memory without re-executing the page. Output caching is configurable, and can be used to cache individual regions or an entire page. Output caching can dramatically improve the performance of data-driven pages by eliminating the need to query the database on every request."

Translation: ASP.NET’s server-side logic really rocks when it comes to your Web site’s performance -- especially if your pages display a lot of database information requested by your users.

"ASP.NET: Understanding Its Real Meaning" by CompareWebHosts.com