Welcome to week – 2 of…
Web Development
Using
ASP .NET
CA – 240
Kashif Jalal
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
ASP .NET Introduction
• ASP.NET is the latest version of Microsoft's
Active Server Pages technology (ASP).
• Before you continue you should have a basic
understanding of the following:
– World Wide Web – WWW
– HTML and the basics of building Web pages
– Scripting languages like JavaScript or VBScript –
the basics of server side scripting
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
What is ASP?
ASP is a server side scripting technology that
enables scripts (embedded in web pages) to be
executed by an Internet server.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
ASP is a Microsoft Technology
ASP stands for Active Server Pages
ASP is a program that runs inside IIS
IIS stands for Internet Information Services
IIS comes as a free component with Windows 2000
IIS is also a part of the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack
The Option Pack can be downloaded from Microsoft
PWS is a smaller - but fully functional - version of IIS
PWS can be found on your Windows 95/98 CD
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
What is an ASP File?
• An ASP file is just the same as an HTML file
• An ASP file can contain text, HTML, XML, and
scripts
• Scripts in an ASP file are executed on the
server
• An ASP file has the file extension ".asp"
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
What is ASP .NET?
• ASP 3.0 is the latest version of ASP, but there
will never be an ASP 4.0 version.
• ASP.NET is the next generation ASP, but it's
not an upgraded version of ASP. ASP.NET is
an entirely new paradigm for server-side ASP
scripting.
• ASP.NET is a part of the .NET Framework.
Microsoft spent three years rewriting
ASP.NET from the ground up, and ASP.NET is
not fully backward compatible with ASP 3.0.
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
The .NET Framework
• The .NET Framework is the infrastructure for the Microsoft .NET
platform.
• The .NET Framework is an environment for building, deploying, and
running Web applications and Web Services.
• The .NET Framework contains a common language runtime and
common class libraries - like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows
Forms - to provide advanced standard services that can be
integrated into a variety of computer systems.
• The .NET Framework provides a feature-rich application
environment, simplified development and easy integration between
a number of different development languages.
• The .NET Framework is language neutral. Currently it supports C++,
C#, Visual Basic, and JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript).
• Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET is a common development
environment for the .NET Framework.
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
Brief History of Server-Side Programming
Technologies
• Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• Internet Server Application Programming
Interface (ISAPI)
• Internet Database Connector (IDC)
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• ASP .NET
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• One of the first technologies to be introduced built into almost all
Web servers
• CGI is a method of obtaining and returning information to and from
the Web server
• CGI, as its name implies, isn’t a language, but rather an interface to
the Web server
• CGI applications can be programmed in a wide variety of languages.
Possibly the most common is Practical Extraction and Report
Language (Perl), C, Python
• Definite advantages of CGI are that it is platform independent and
built into most Web servers
• Possibly the greatest pitfall of CGI from a performance point of view
in Windows is that each client request for a CGI “Web page”
requires a new process to be created, which consumes vast
amounts of system resources
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
Internet Server Application
Programming Interface (ISAPI)
• Microsoft developed (ISAPI) for its Internet Information
Server (IIS) to eliminate the major performance bottleneck
of CGI: the need to create a new process for each client
request.
• ISAPI was intended to replace CGI for IIS by allowing
developers to do everything they could by using CGI
executables, but do it with significantly less performance
overhead.
• ISAPI applications are compiled as Windows dynamic link
libraries (DLLs).
• ISAPI applications run in the IIS process space, which
allows for execution faster than that of CGI applications.
• There are two different types of ISAPI applications, ISAPI
Filters and ISAPI Extensions
• ISAPI Filters run in the background and can monitor Web
server requests and perform a variety of tasks accordingly
• ISAPI Extensions are the rough equivalent of CGI
executables and run upon client request.
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
Internet Database Connector (IDC)
• Microsoft’s Internet Database Connector (IDC)
technology has been included in IIS since its inception
and is used to provide easy database connectivity for
Web pages
• Each page requires two files: a query file and a template
file
• The query file contains the database connection
information and the SQL query.
• The template file contains HTML and tags denoting
where specific data from the query file must be inserted
• This method of database connectivity was very easy to
use, but it had one major pitfall in that there was no
place to put business logic
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
Active Server Pages (ASP)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Microsoft combined the best features of IDC and ISAPI to produce
Active Server Pages (ASP)
ASP pages offer the ease of use of IDC by allowing database and
business logic code to be inserted directly into pages using
special tags, and they offer the performance advantages of ISAPI
ASP is very scalable, and this has been proven time and time
again with many large sites relying on ASP
ASP was a huge leap forward and offered a completely new
paradigm for dynamic Web page development when it was
introduced
ASP’s unique approach allowed for dramatic increases in
productivity and opened up the exciting area of dynamic Web
page development to many novice programmers who were
bewildered by the complexity of CGI and ISAPI
This was helped largely by the fact that the primary languages for
ASP development are VBScript and JScript
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
ASP .NET
ASP.NET isn’t simply the next version of ASP—it’s a completely redesigned
technology that takes the best aspects of ASP and merges them with the
power of pure object-oriented programming (OOP), a powerful
development framework with features like:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
A fully compiled environment.
An integral part of .NET and the .NET Framework.
Server controls
Event driven programming
Separation of code from content
Session state management
User input validation
Web services
Caching services
Security
Debugging and tracing
Deployment
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)
Visual Studio .NET IDE Layout
Kashif Jalal CA-240 (072)