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When the web took off Microsoft was probably urgently trying to figure out how to take advantage of it and lead the wave. What they came up with was a technology called Active Server Pages or ASP. First released in December 1996, ASP has been through some major changes. It has grown and adapted to the new way of developing web sites and applications for the internet.

There have been two major forms of ASP: classic (or traditional) ASP and ASP.Net. Each of these has had several version releases over the years.

• ASP 1.0 released December 1996
• ASP 2.0 released September 1997
• ASP 3.0 released November 2000
• ASP.Net 1.0 released January 2002
• ASP.Net 1.1 released April 2003
• ASP.Net 2.0 released November 7, 2005

Each version has improved the technology to some extent; some more than others.

ASP (classic or traditional ASP)

This was the first version of ASP to appear. It was a scripting engine used to create dynamic web pages (instead of static html or CGI scripting). The version changes all came with the new versions of Microsoft's Web Server IIS. Some of the characteristics of ASP included:

• Writing dynamically generated scripts in VBscript, Jscript, JavaScript or Perlscript
• ASP Pages were interpreted – meaning they weren’t compiled code. They were written in scripting languages that were read by the ASP engine. Code was executed from top to bottom and the resulting html was displayed in the browser window.
• ASP pages were a mix of html code and scripting with the final html being written to the browser. You could tell the script because it was always written between the following tags <% scripting %>
• ASP was not an object-oriented technology

ASP.Net

With the emergence of the .Net framework came a new version of ASP called ASP.Net. No longer an interpreted scripting technology, it was now object oriented and developed using full blown languages (like VB.Net and C#).

The biggest changes in the ASP.Net releases came between 1.1 and 2.0 and along with the ASP technology some big changes with the integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio. It’s difficult to describe the changes to ASP.Net without including the changes to the IDE.

ASP.Net 1.1

• Created sites and applications using Visual Studio 2003
• Object oriented and used full development languages
• Code is compiled not interpreted
• Introduced the concept of “code behind pages” – the interface (markup) is developed on the screen using a GUI format (or html code is desired) and the code was placed in a separate class file “behind” the interface file. Together the two files compiled to create an ASPX web page.

ASP.Net 2.0 (the latest incarnation)

This version has greatly improved on the previous version in many ways. But it’s more than simply an upgraded programming model – it’s a completely new approach to designing and developing web sites and applications. It has a greater learning curve than one might think.

• Although it still compiled code, the code does not have to be compiled prior to using it – it is compiled on demand (when the page is requested)
• It uses code separation as opposed to “code-behind”. Code separation means several things: it supports the separation of the layout from the code and the markup page can be modified separately from the code page. It’s also promotes object orientation and tends to lead to more modular code.
• Designing of layout pages is a dramatic change with the introduction of master pages, and content pages. These different pages promote the ability to design common overall site themes, graphics, and navigation and place them in a master page that is then used by the content pages. Content pages contain the main content to be displayed on the page.
• Some of the improvements to Visual Studio came with version 2005 and included a built-in web server, drag and drop component creation and automatic event creation by double clicking.

This overview of ASP and ASP.Net has just scratched the surface of the Microsoft Active Server Page technology, which has improved dramatically in 10 years and will continue to improve.

Microsoft does, on occasion, offer free online training modules to help people get up to speed with their technologies. To say they’ve come a long way with their web development technologies is an understatement. To say they have taken the web by storm and are leading the wave – well that’s another story to be argued fiercely by the Open Source and Java communities.