Chapter 1. Introduction

ASP.NET is Microsoft's latest technology for building web-based applications and services, a successor to Active Server Pages (ASP) that draws on the power of the .NET Framework development platform and the Visual Studio .NET developer toolset. To better understand ASP.NET, it is important to understand some key concepts of the .NET development platform. It is also helpful to grasp object-oriented development (OOD), which is at the very heart of the .NET Framework that provides the foundation for ASP.NET development. In this chapter, we'll review these concepts, look at what's new in ASP.NET (versus classic ASP), review new features in ASP.NET 1.1, and discuss choosing a language to suit your needs.