Is anyone knowledgeable with ASP.net?
I have trouble gaining a concept of what is meant by ASP.net.
I have read on w3Schools that it is a web development framework from Microsoft. It can support webpages, webforms, and MVC.
Now the problem I have is this:
Traditional ASP seems to be to be like a browser script sort of thing.
Whereas ASP.net seems to be HTML, CSS, browser scripting, server scripting, GUI objects, and a bunch of files like web.config etc
Have I got the meaning right? Or is ASP.net something else?
Traditional ASP is based on Visual Basic 6 / VB Script. Its more akin to what Java Server Pages was like in the same time frame when ASP came out. Basically, an ASP page is like an HTML file, but there are special tags in it where you can put in VB Script code that gets run when the page is requested by a user from their web browser. Some of this can just be code that performs operations to set the value of some variables (such as retrieving data from a database - while others can be to insert the values of these variables inline into your HTML. Also, some special variables are exposed to the VB Script that aren't available if you were to run a piece of VB Script in a stand-alone environment, i.e. via cscript or wscript.exe - these variables include session state, server state, access to browser cookies etc.
ASP.NET is in some ways the same thing - but its newer and it builds on the same concepts from ASP but really expands upon them.
First, ASP.NET is no longer based on VB Script / Visual Basic 6. Its based on Microsoft's .NET platform and programming environment. Your ASP.NET pages can use different .NET languages, such as VB.NET or C#.
Like ASP, your ASP.NET pages can contain VB.NET or C# code fragments in the .aspx file itself (which is the file most analogous to an HTML file). And, in fact, if you want to, you can basically write an ASP.NET page using only this paradigm, but what's been added to .NET makes this paradigm obsolete.
First, ASP.NET adds a few concepts such as web controls. Web controls are designed to make programming a web page similar to programming a Windows Forms application in Visual Basic 6 or the .NET languages. Most of the controls you could add to a Windows Forms application have equivalent web controls in ASP.NET - for example, you can have a text box or a data grid in an ASP.NET web application, just as you can have them in a Windows Forms application. And ASP.NET adds the concept of page events to your web page. For instance, if you load data into a data grid on your ASP.NET web page and then the user clicks on the column header of a column to sort the data by that column, it will fire an event on the web server that you can handle in your ASP.NET code, just as you can handle a similar event in a Visual Basic 6 Windows Forms application. ASP.NET automatically takes care of all the plumbing / wiring to make this happen. In ASP - programming something like a data grid was a manual process, there were no standard tools to help you - you'd connect to the database, run your query, loop through the result set and output some HTML for each record in the result set - all programmed manually.
Another difference is that whereas each web page in the ASP world is basically a single .asp file, in the ASP.NET world there can be more to it than that. For instance, in ASP each web page is an .asp file. In ASP.NET, each web page consists of a .aspx file, but also a code behind file which is either an .aspx.vb file or an .aspx.cs file (c#) - depending on which .NET language you're using. The code behind file contains event handlers and other code that gets run, and provides a way to programatially interact with the controls on the web page and the events that they fire, without shoving all of this code in a single file with your HTML.
Another type of file in ASP.NET is a user control file - .ascx - these are basically custom web controls that you can create and then include in your other pages. An example would be if you wanted to include a stock ticker on several pages of your web site, you could program a user control for it once, and then use that user control within your other .ASPX files very easily.
ASP.NET can also create web service end points (.asmx) files, allowing your ASP.NET application to provide web services to other applications.
There is also several other types of files. First, the web.config file that you mentioned can be used to store configuration setting for your application. For instance, your application would probably connect to a different database in your test environment than it would in your production environment. So in this case you could have two web.confif files, one for testing and one for production, that stores the connection information for the database. The other code in the application can read these configuration settings, which allows you to avoid the need to hard-code things like database connections, and makes it easier to reconfigure the application (and to deploy to different environments) without recompiling.
Hey thanks for that answer.
So am I right in thinking Asp.net is a framework or methodology for developing web applications/site?
I think it is the term I have a problem with, when I see on job apps they want asp.net I never know whether to say I have this experience, but from reading your message it sounds like I do have it.
I was under the impression that asp is a language, but it seems it is not.
So if I have developed a web site using axpx files, css file, web controls, code behind files, web config file, web services etc, then does that mean it was done using asp.net?
I just assumed I was doing C#.net because thats the language I used.
HauntedKnight
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Wikipedia gives a good definition: ASP.NET is a server-side Web application framework designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages.
I have done a lot of development in ASP.NET, and it sounds like you have done it too if you've created aspx files, code behind, web.config etc.
Make sure it says it on your CV, as recruitment agents just see it as a buzz word that you do or don't have.
So am I right in thinking Asp.net is a framework or methodology for developing web applications/site?
I think it is the term I have a problem with, when I see on job apps they want asp.net I never know whether to say I have this experience, but from reading your message it sounds like I do have it.
I was under the impression that asp is a language, but it seems it is not.
So if I have developed a web site using axpx files, css file, web controls, code behind files, web config file, web services etc, then does that mean it was done using asp.net?
I just assumed I was doing C#.net because thats the language I used.
Yes, if you've done that, then you've done ASP.NET - just without realizing it I guess!