Strengths of ASP.NET compared to ASP

The wide range of web controls, web classes, and development tools can significantly minimize the development time of software modules, and allows the web developer to easily reuse the same program codes in different applications. ASP.NET has also made significantly easier the capabilities of data access as compared to the older ASP. For example, it is much easier and faster to generate a web page that contains a list of front-end (at the end-user’s side) data retrieved from a back-end (on the web server) database.

Other advantages of ASP.NET are:

• The pre-compiled program code enables the web applications to run much faster, with the capability of more programming errors to be detected and eliminated during the development stage, and allows the programmer to deploy the web application without actually having to attach the source code.
• The web controls now allow the web programmer to easily use many user-defined controls which are routinely required by the end-users, for example, website’s menus.
• The additional web components do not need to be registered on the back-end web server from the operating console, but now are easily initialized at run-time of the application. This enables the clients to load libraries on the web server without asking the web host to assist them in registering them.
• ASP.NET can now inherit all privileges on the file system.
• The affinity with the style and feel of Windows application programming makes the transition from one program to another more intuitive for programmers.
• The availability of a set of controls and the class libraries allows the faster development and deployment of good web applications rich with better looking and performing web controls and program code.
• The ability to perform a cache of entire pages, or part of the pages, or the application data greatly enhances the overall performance of the website.
• If an ASP.NET fails to allocate the memory it needs (called the memory leakage), it can download the form from the memory which contains the entire runtime environment and control the problem. The Framework .NET provides the ‘AppDomain’ class to perform all these operations, loading / unloading, and other such operations that relate to the web application.
• The ASP.NET session can be saved to a SQL server database or can be saved in a separate process residing on the same machine as the web server. The data and the properties of the session are preserved and are not lost when the Internet Information Services (IIS) is reset, or when the active process of ASP.NET is recycled.
• Using Visual Studio .NET and IIS Server, the web programmer can debug the server-side by using the same tools used in most other development environments.
• The capacity of the platform .NET CLR supports many languages, which allows the web programmers to write code to Web pages in VB.NET, C #, J #, etc.

Critical to ASP.NET:

ASP and ASP.NET can run together in the same web application. This approach allows developers to migrate from one environment to another gradually rather than using them all at once. With the IIS 6.0 and earlier versions, the web pages were written using earlier versions of the ASP framework, which cannot share the same session without the use of third-party libraries. This limitation does not exist now in ASP.NET, and the ASP applications that run together under IIS 7.

In some instances, at runtime the ASP.NET recycles the active process, resulting in re-employment of more than 60% of available memory. The web programmer can configure it effectively so that the recycling takes place only after a certain number of requests and after a certain amount of time, etc.

However in doing so, the user can lose the status of the current session. If your application uses session state to load the authentication information (which is not recommended as the cookie-based authentication and membership is an option already built into the framework), and if the application is configured to use sessions in process then the user can be disconnected if the process is recycled.

Study: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons.

Related posts:

1. Principles of ASP.NET | Part 1

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