In Chapter 1, we looked at the history of web development technologies, culminating in smart server-oriented code that generates client-side markup as well as script that gets rendered by the browser for your users. The Microsoft technology that achieves this is ASP.NET, where ASP stands for Active Server Pages, and .NET is Microsoft’s contemporary software runtime environment. In this chapter,
... [Show full abstract] you’ll get an overview ofwhatASP.NET is and how it works. You’ll first look at the tools that are available to build ASP.NET applications, from the free Microsoft Visual Studio Express tools to the various professional Visual Studio 2008—based packages. You’ll see how to build an ASP.NET application with these tools before digging into the architecture of ASP.NET so that you can understand how it all fits together.