ASP.NET

ASP.NET is an open-sourceserver-side web application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services.

It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. The ASP.NET SOAP extension framework allows ASP.NET components to process SOAP messages.

ASP.NET's successor is ASP.NET Core. It is a re-implementation of ASP.NET as a modular web framework, together with other frameworks like Entity Framework. The new framework uses the new open-source .NET Compiler Platform (codename "Roslyn") and is cross platform. ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, and ASP.NET Web Pages (a platform using only Razor pages) have merged into a unified MVC 6.

After four years of development, and a series of beta releases in 2000 and 2001, ASP.NET 1.0 was released on January 5, 2002 as part of version 1.0 of the .NET Framework. Even prior to the release, dozens of books had been written about ASP.NET, and Microsoft promoted it heavily as part of its platform for Web services. Scott Guthrie became the product unit manager for ASP.NET, and development continued apace, with version 1.1 being released on April 24, 2003 as a part of Windows Server 2003. ASP.NET is loosely based on HTML. This release focused on improving ASP.NET's support for mobile devices.