History
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,[1] 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. This release focused on improving ASP.NET's support for mobile devices.
Characteristics
Pages
ASP.NET Web pages, known officially as Web Forms,[2] are the main building block for application development.[3] Web forms are contained in files with a ".aspx" extension; these files typically contain static (X)HTML markup, as well as markup defining server-side Web Controls and User Controls where the developers place all the rc content[further explanation needed] for the Web page. Additionally, dynamic code which runs on the server can be placed in a page within a block <% -- dynamic code -- %>, which is similar to other Web development technologies such as PHP, JSP, and ASP. With ASP.NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft introduced a new code-behind
model which allows static text to remain on the .aspx page, while
dynamic code remains in an .aspx.vb or .aspx.cs or .aspx.fs file
(depending on the programming language used).[4]
Directives
A directive is special instructions on how ASP.NET should process the page.[5] The most common directive is <%@ Page %> which can specify many attributes used by the ASP.NET page parser and compiler.
