Concept

Unlike most of the other technologies we’ve discussed, ASP.NET (the ASP stands for Active Server Pages, a holdover acronym from an older technology that was popular in the 1990s, and the .NET identifies it as part of Microsoft’s broader programming suite) belongs to a company. Microsoft developed it as a premier tool to make interactive and dynamic websites. It’s one of the most popular technologies in use on the web today and it is extremely powerful.

There have been thousands of pages written about ASP.NET, but we’ll briefly outline the concept here. ASP.NET requires a special syntax in its HTML. This special code tells the ASP.NET software to do certain things. As we said, it’s an extremely powerful and flexible platform; using ASP.NET, your web pages can interact with databases, perform calculations on the server-side, and handle just about every common task online. The code used for ASP.NET technologies is very similar to the code used for all .NET technologies, even ones that are offline. Webmasters can use a language of their choice, though the two most popular ones are Visual Basic and C#.

Examples

Microsoft’s entire site, particularly their knowledge base sections, naturally use ASP.NET technology. .NET technology is one of the most common technologies of choice for mid-size websites and companies. You can recognize ASP.NET webpages by their unique file extension, .aspx (as opposed to .html or .php).