The Evolution of ASP.NET

When Microsoft released ASP.NET 1.0, even it didn’t anticipate how enthusiastically the technology
would be adopted. ASP.NET quickly became the standard for developing web applications with
Microsoft technologies and a heavy-hitting competitor against all other web development platforms.
Since that time, ASP.NET has had several updates. The following sections explain how ASP.NET has
evolved over the years.
ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1
When ASP.NET 1.0 first hit the scene, its core idea was a model of web page design called web forms. As
you’ll see in the early chapters in this book, the web form model is simply an abstraction that models
your page as a combination of objects. When a browser requests a specific page, ASP.NET instantiates
the page object, and then creates objects for all the ASP.NET controls inside that page. The page and its
control go through a sequence of life-cycle events, and then—when the page processing is finished—
they render the final HTML and are released from memory. The bulk of ASP.NET programming is filling
in what happens in between.
ASP.NET 2.0
It’s a testament to the good design of ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 that few of the changes introduced in
ASP.NET 2.0 were fixes for existing features. Instead, ASP.NET 2.0 kept the same core abstraction (the
web form model) and concentrated on adding new, higher-level features. Some of the highlights include:
• Master pages: Master pages are reusable page templates. For example, you can
use a master page to ensure that every web page in your application has the same
header, footer, and navigation controls.
• Themes: Themes allow you to define a standardized set of appearance
characteristics for web controls. Once defined, you can apply these formatting
presets across your website for a consistent look.
• Navigation. ASP.NET’s navigation framework includes a mechanism for defining
site maps that describe the logical arrangement of pages in a website. It also
includes navigation controls (such as trees and breadcrumb-style links) that use
this information to let users move through the site.
• Security and membership: ASP.NET 2.0 added a slew of security-related features,
including automatic support for storing user credentials, a role-based
authorization feature, and prebuilt security controls for common tasks like logging
in, registering, and retrieving a forgotten password.
• Data source controls: The data source control model allows you to define how
your page interacts with a data source declaratively in your markup, rather than
having to write the equivalent data access code by hand. Best of all, this feature
doesn’t force you to abandon good component-based design—you can bind to a
custom data component just as easily as you bind directly to the database.
• Web parts: One common type of web application is the portal, which centralizes
different information using separate panes on a single web page. Web parts
provide a prebuilt portal framework complete with a flow-based layout,
configurable views, and even drag-and-drop support.

• Profiles: Profiles allow you to store user-specific information in a database
without writing any database code. Instead, ASP.NET takes care of the tedious
work of retrieving the profile data when it’s needed and saving the profile data
when it changes.