Understanding .NET (2nd Edition)

5. Building Web Applications: ASP.NET

Accessing software over the Web has become the norm. Most new enterprise applications offer at least the option of a browser interface, while Internet applications offer nothing else. Given this, an application platform that doesn't provide first-class support for building Web-based software is doomed to failure. And yet how we use software via the Web is changing. While communicating with a user through a browser is certainly important, Web services are also on the scene. The Web is expanding from a world driven solely by eyeballs to one that's also driven by applications.

ASP.NET is the .NET Framework's foundation for building Web applications. Implemented primarily as part of the .NET Framework class library, it supports creating both browser applications and Web services applications. Like everything else in the class library, ASP.NET defines a group of types contained in several namespaces. The root namespace for ASP.NET is System.Web, and immediately below it are several more namespaces. The most important of these are System.Web.UI, which contains the types used to build browser Web applications, and System.Web.Services, which contains the types used to build Web services applications. This chapter describes how ASP.NET 2.0, the version contained in the .NET Framework 2.0 and supported by Visual Studio 2005, allows developers to create browser applications. The ASP.NET Web services technology, a largely independent topic, is described in Chapter 7.