From the course: Learning ASP.NET
Explore the ASP.NET platform
ASP.NET'S a powerful platform for building web applications on the Windows operating system. To give you a little history, the first version was ASP.NET 1.0 and it was released back in 2002. It evolved from a traditional web technology called Active Server Pages, or ASP for short. ASP.NET's known to be a mature and stable framework that's powered many enterprise web applications. Let's explore the platform and its essential features to help you decide if it's the right choice for your next project. One of the core strengths of ASP.NET is in building dynamic websites with familiar technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You'll have multiple frameworks to choose from for building your site, including web forms, web pages, and ASP.NET MVC. You can even mix and match these within a single application depending on your needs. We'll take a closer look at each of these approaches later on in the course. ASP.NET also offers a framework for building RESTful HTTP services called ASP.NET Web API. Modern system architectures often include multiple applications and APIs, and they might need to support both the browser and native mobile platforms. With Web API, we can create a rich set of services that power all of our apps, whether they're single-page, server-based web client apps, or mobile apps. Web API supports multiple content formats like JSON and XML to exchange data with the server. In modern applications, we expect content and information to be updated instantly. ASP.NET offers us real-time capabilities through the SignalR library. SignalR makes it easier to implement bidirectional communication between the server and the client without having to worry about connection management and transport details. It's important to understand that while you can use different frameworks to build your applications, like web forms or MVC, they all share the same ASP.NET HTTP runtime environment. This means that managing requests, handling sessions, and other core ASP.NET functionality is available regardless of the framework you choose. Because of the shared runtime environment, the frameworks and Web API can coexist in the same application. This offers you a lot of flexibility, and you'll hear the term One ASP.NET used to describe it. Let's take a moment now to talk about the .NET framework which is the foundation that ASP.NET is built on. This is an object-oriented class library for building a variety of apps like console, Windows-based, and web-based ASP.NET apps. With a .NET framework, you get a consistent development experience across different types of applications. A core part of the framework is a runtime environment called the Common Language Runtime or CLR. The purpose of the CLR is to manage code at execution time. It provides services like memory and thread management, type safety, and exception handling. Let me show you how this works. The code you write in the .NET-supported languages gets compiled into a common intermediate language, or IL for short. The Common Language Runtime manages that intermediate language code. It can then compile it to native machine code using a process called just-in-time compiling. With the capabilities of ASP.NET and the .NET framework, you can create robust websites, APIs, and real-time funcationality for your apps. If you need support for other operating systems like Mac OS and Linux, be sure to check out ASP.NET Core. It's an open source and cross-platform framework that evolved from ASP.NET. You can find useful documentation for both ASP.NET and ASP.Net Core on the ASP.NET website.
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