ASP .NET Web Developer's Guide P2

IntroductionWith 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....
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ASP .NET Web Developer`s Guide P2 Chapter 1Introducing ASP.NET Solutions in this chapter: s Learning from the History of ASP s Reviewing the Basics of the ASP.NET Platform s How Web Servers Execute ASP Files s Taking Security Precautions Summary Solutions Fast Track Frequently Asked Questions 12 Chapter 1 • Introducing ASP.NET 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 right back to 1995 and the momentous occa- sion when Microsoft realized they were falling behind in a fundamental shift in the industry by not embracing the Internet. Up until that point Microsoft had been developing their proprietary technologies, tools, and network protocols for the Microsoft Network; all of a sudden they needed an Internet strategy and fast. Microsoft has gone from a position of playing catch-up to one close to domi- nance, with the Internet Explorer Web browser having a strangle-hold on the Web browsing market, and Internet Information Server (IIS) installed at the majority of Fortune 1000 companies. The Origins of ASP Back in the mid ‘90s, when the commercial Web world was still young, there was not a great deal of choice of tools for the Web developer who wanted to make his or her Web site a truly useful place to do business.The choices were limited www.syngress.com Introducing ASP.NET • Chapter 1 3in both available server-side programming platforms and also desktop develop-ment tools to produce the solutions. In the end, the programmer was stuck withclumsy Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs using compiled languagessuch as C, Delphi, and Visual Basic, or interpreted scripting languages like Perl orRexx, and operating system shell scripts on systems such as UNIX. In early 1996 Microsoft had a first stab at improving the situation byincluding the Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) tech-nology as part of Internet Information Server. ISAPI is an extension to theWindows Win32 API. It was developed as a way to create Web server softwarethat interacts with the inner workings of Internet Information Server, bringingwhat was claimed to be a five-fold increase in performance. As you can wellimagine from this description, as well as the immediate performance increase, italso had a side effect of increasing the complexity of the development for theprogrammer. It wasn’t for the faint hearted, and it takes some serious hardcoreprogramming knowledge to do ISAPI applications right. As well as ISAPI,Microsoft encouraged developers to embrace their Internet Database Connector(IDC) technology.This was a new way to connect Web sites to back-enddatabases through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). The ISAPI and IDC technologies lifted Microsoft’s youthful and as yetunproven Web server from being a glorified file server to being a basic interactiveapplication server platform for the first time. Other vendors had tools out there, and several were very popular, such asNetscape Livewire. Livewire was a technology that ran under Netscape’s Webserver and used a version of JavaScript for page logic, ...