Overview of ASP.NET - ASP.NET Tutorial

- [Instructor] So let's get started and have a little bit of an overview of ASP.NET and what exactly is ASP.NET. But first let's start with a bit of a history. ASP.NET first came out as alpha back in 1998, and they seen the first official release in Jaunary 2002. At the time, Microsoft was developing the .NET framework, it was something completely new revolutionary. It was using a lot of the lessons the Java community have learned about creating a managed environment where the code can be compiled at runtime, and you get a lot of advantages of optimizing for the processor that you want to use and so on. And one of the things that they want to address was the fact that a lot of web application were created at the time. Microsoft already had a product called ASP. That was the classic ASP, but it was more of a server-side scripting language, so it wasn't really a programming language as ASP.NEST Web Form was. So they created the Web Forms as the first UI framework for ASP.NET. Now keep in mind, MVC, which is widely popular at the moment was only released in 2009. So back then, there was no idea about the MVC and the like. Now, ASP.NET got a spawn out of it called ASP.NET core which was released back in 2016 and which is completely rewrite of ASP.NET and it does not have support for Web Forms. So if you are still using Web Forms, you have to use the full-blown ASP.NET framework. Now, if we start to all at the ASP.NET Web Forms, since 2013 it's been kind of in maintenance mode. What that means, it means that Microsoft is not actively adding new features, mainly because the product is featured complete. It works as it is. There are very few bugs reported against it, so the only Microsoft is doing at the moment is supporting that, and if they find bugs, they are going to fix it in the resident with the normal releases that they are doing for .Net framework that are going to include the fixes. This is a still very widely used framework inside enterprises. So if you look at enterprises today, they have a lot of investment that they've done in the past 20 years in ASP.NET web forms applications. And of course, they still want to use them. And as it says here, it's still supported by Microsoft. So you don't have a problem if you are running, if you are creating right now an application using ASP.NET web forms, it shouldn't be a problem for you to get support by Microsoft. However, a word of caution, if you want to start right now with a new web form application, the help might be quite thin, mainly because it's deep, deep, deep, inside you know, Google search. So you won't find any help in the first two, three pages, so you'll really have to dig for it. Plus, that the supported tools on this ecosystem, again, are fewer and fewer. When we look at ASP.net web forms, when it first came out it actually tried to adverse some of the challenges that we had with web development. One of the very important things was actually offering intuitive and consistent object model. So, then they offered an event-driven programming model. One of the biggest problems with HTML and HTTP development is that web applications are inherently stateless. Meaning that between calls, so from when the client gets the first page, and then when he needs to speak again with the server, the state of the communication between them is forgotten by the server. So, you need to find a way to do that, and that is what actually ASP.NET web forms was doing. They created an intuitive state management using something called the view state where the whole discussion between the client and the server felt very natural and as one single discussion. Another big advantage, especially at the time like 20 years ago when we had different browsers that were supporting different features, the resulting applications from ASP.net web forms were browser independent, making it very easy for you to develop once and use it in many browsers. And I would say the biggest advantages is what the support of ASP.NET framework, or actually the .Net framework common language runtime, and why is that an advantage? Because it gave us a lot of libraries, a lot of ready-made code by Microsoft that we could use inside our application. There are many features, so if we look at ASP.NET web forms, we have support for server controls, meaning those are controls that we can drag and drop on the page and then we can just get the functionality and they will be responsible for generating the HTML code for the client application. We have support for Master pages, that means it's very easy for us to create the layout that is common for the whole site that we are developing, we have support for working with data as you will see in this course. It's very easy for us to add a connection to a database and then just create controls there where the data is automatically populated with support for editing, with support for updating, and deleting and so on. Another big advantage is the support for membership. That didn't come actually with the .NET framework, the ASP.NET web form 1.0, it came in 2.0, but it actually made life much easier for us as developers to create support for logging in to applications, and saving information about the users, like profile information and so on. Other features is routing, so routing it means that I can actually write friendly URLs and they will automatically be translated into resources on my particular application. Support for state, we have different kind of states we can actually use session state, we have view state, we have state for control, and everything is done automatically again by Web Form, so we don't have to look into that. Built in support for security, so I can secure parts of my application. In using the membership model for instance, to decide if a user gets access to something or not. They're working a lot on improving the performance, so generally speaking, if whatever improvements they're making for ASP.Net, those will actually help us as well in the ASP.Net web forms. They have support for client script and client frameworks. What that means, it means I can actually create server-side code that would be translated into JavaScript so the client application would have better response times. Support for internationalization, so it's very easy to create different versions in different languages of your application. It has built in support for debugging and error handling as we are going to see that. And it has very wide support for deployment and hosting of the application.