The .NET Revolution
December 4, 2000
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Want to know what Microsoft has in store for ASP
developers in the future? This informative article will give you
a first look at what's coming down the road.
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Introduction
Microsoft is about the change the way we do web developmentagain.
Just a few years ago they introduced their Active Server Page
technology, otherwise known as ASP, that allowed developers to
directly embed code within their web pages that was executed on
the server with the results sent back to the client. While this
type of embedded code was a dream come true to many developers who
were fed up with
CGI
and the like, it still left much to be desired.
From a developer's perspective, pages designed with ASP technology
can be lengthy, difficult to read and just plain sloppy. Not only
that, but the developer is restricted to using VBScript, a
watered-down incarnation of Visual Basic or JScript, Microsoft's
attempt at reinventing the wheel that is
JavaScript. Neither of these
languages is very powerful feature-wise, and being scripting
languages, they are not strongly typed (simply put, strongly typed
languages are those languages that require specific variable and type
declarations and often adhere more strictly to syntactical and
logical requirements) which tends to make these languages and ASP
pages less efficient overall.
Thankfully, Microsoft has been well aware of these problems for
some time. In fact, they already have a solution, and it is called
Microsoft .NET (pronounced "dot Net"). .NET is poised to offer a lot
of value to the web development arena due to its new approach to web
development, which includes a totally redeveloped ASP called ASP+ or
ASP.NET (and also ADO.NET and some other really nifty stuff!).
To clear up any confusion about .NET, we will begin in this
article to take a detailed look at the .NET framework. In addition
and more importantly, we will look at how it will impact you as a web
developer and how it will really make your life easier if you are an
ASP developer. The remainder of this article is not code intensive,
but it is still going to be pretty complex. I will attempt to explain
everything as understandably as possible, because I understand that
conceptual + computing = headache for most people, including myself
at times.
Contents:
What is .NET?
The Future of ASP
A Server With Memory
There is More!
The .NET Revolution
What is .NET?
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