7.2 ASP.NET

Visual Basic developers have long enjoyed the ease of programming with forms and controls. Writing a VB form-based application is as simple as dragging some controls onto a form and writing some event-handling functions. This is one of the reasons VB has attracted lots of programmers interested in speed of development. Microsoft wisely built this feature into ASP.NET.

ASP.NET simplifies web page development with form-based programming. In ASP.NET, these forms are called Web Forms and are analogous to VB forms, replacing ASP pages. Similar to VB, Web Forms programming is also event based. We don't have to write in-line ASP scripts and rely on the top-down parsing interpretation as in ASP programming. To match the rich set of ActiveX controls that VB programmers love in their toolset, ASP.NET equips ASP programmers with server controls. To further enhance the productivity of developers, ASP.NET's Web Forms also allow for the separation of the application logic and the presentation layer.

ASP.NET evolves from the ASP programming model with the following additional benefits:

• Clean separation between the application logic (server-side code) and the presentation layer (HTML markup)—no more spaghetti code

• A rich set of server controls that automatically render HTML suitable for any clients and that additionally manage their states

• Enhanced session-state management

• An event-based programming model on the server side, which is simpler and more intuitive than an older script-based model like ASP

• Application logic that can be written in any Microsoft .NET language (VB, C#, Managed C++, etc.); application server-side code is compiled for better performance

• Visual Studio .NET as a RAD tool, which simplifies the development process of Web Forms