Introducing Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003

Applications developed in the Windows Server 2003 environment are more responsive and available than those developed in earlier versions of Windows, and because the environment can be managed by fewer people than before, it will deliver lower TCO with better performance, improved scalability and reliability, and more robust security. In addition, Windows Server 2003 eases the burden on IT administrators by making it easier to deploy and manage applications:

• ASP.NET: integrated with Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0.

  ASP.NET is integrated with the IIS 6.0 process model and leverages support for multiple application pools. This means that individual ASP.NET applications are isolated and talk directly to the kernel-mode HTTP listener. This leads to a reduced number of process hops and allows ASP.NET applications to leverage kernel-mode file caching.

• ASP.NET: advanced compilation.

  The .NET Framework advanced compilation provides increased performance by compiling pages instead of interpreting them. It supports both precompiled applications and on-the-fly -compiled applications. ASP.NET leverages more advanced threading models, which allow it to perform asynchronous I/O, leading to improved performance and scalability. This eliminates the need to convert server-side code before execution and therefore conserves server resources, increasing server performance and scalability.

• ASP.NET: intelligent caching.

  The ASP.NET programming model provides a cache API that enables programmers to activate caching services to improve performance. An output cache saves completely rendered pages, and a fragment cache stores partial pages. Classes are provided so that applications, HTTP modules, and request handlers can store arbitrary objects in the cache as needed.

• Garbage-collected environment.

  The garbage collector in the common language runtime provides an efficient environment for memory management in Web server scenarios. It avoids heap fragmentation issues by using a classic allocation/free model.