ASP.NET basic

ASP.NET is the next generation ASP, but it's not an upgraded version of ASP. ASP.NET is an entirely new technology for server-side scripting.

ASP.NET is a part of the Microsoft .NET framework, and a powerful tool for creating dynamic and interactive web pages.

.NET is a major technology change for Microsoft and the software world. Just like the computer world moved from DOS to Windows, now they are moving to  .NET.

NET technology was introduced by Microsoft, to catch the market from the SUN's Java. Few years back, Microsoft had only VC++ and VB to compete with Java, but Java was catching the market very fast. With the world depending more and more the Internet/Web and java related tools becoming the best choice for the web applications, Microsoft seemed to be loosing the battle. Thousands of programmers moved to java from VC++ and VB. This was alarming for Microsoft and many of the Microsoft fan's kept on asking "is Microsoft sleeping?". And Microsoft had the answer. One fine morning, they announced : "We are not sleeping. We have the answer for you.". And that answer was .NET.
But Microsoft has a wonderful history of starting late but catching up quickly. This is true in case of .NET too. Microsoft put their best men at work for a secret project called Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS)., under the direct supervision of Mr. Bill Gates. The outcome of the project is what we now know as .NET. Even though .NET has borrowed most of it's ideas from Sun's J2EE, it has really outperformed their competitors.

Microsoft's VC++ was a powerful tool. But it was too complex. It has too many datatypes, and developers had to learn many libraries including WIndows SDK, MFC, ATL, COM etc. There were many datatype compatibility issues while exchanging data between different layers. Visual Basic was too easy, and many serious programmers hated it just for that reason. Even though Visual basic was very easy to use, it was not very flexible to develop serious applications. SUN's Java became a very good choice for these reasons. It had the flixibility and power of C++ and at the same time easy enough to catch the attention of VB programmers.

Microsoft recognised these factors and they introducd the .NET considering all these factors. All unwanted complexities are eliminated and a pure object oriented programming model was introduced. This makes programmer's life very easy.

.NET framework comes with a single class library. And thats all programmers need to learn!! Whether they write the code in C# or VB.NET or J#, it doesn't matter, you just use the .NET class library. There is no classes specific to any language. There is nothing more you can do in a language, which you can't do in any other .NET language. You can write code in C# or VB.NET with the same number of lines of code, same performance and same efficiency, because eveyone uses same .NET class library.