Active Server Pages and the .Net framework

An Active Server Page (ASP) is an HTML page that includes one or more scripts (small embedded programs) that are processed on a Microsoft Web server before the page is sent to the user. An ASP is somewhat similar to a server-side include or a common gateway interface (CGI) application in that all involve programs that run on the server, usually tailoring a page for the user. Typically, the script in the Web page at the server uses input received as the result of the user's request for the page to access data from a database and then builds or customizes the page on the fly before sending it to the requestor. Microsoft has further extened the capabilities of ASP. The interfaces and capabilities of ASP programming has been significantly increased with the .net release making it a very powerful web infrastructure and reducing development time for experienced .net developers. Of course one must be careful when choosing the .net platform. .net is a Microsoft product and therefore requires you be running Windows and IIS. Therefore code written for the .net platform will not be portable to other operating systems such as Linux.