ASP.NET / aspx Programming & Development

ASP.NET development & programming takes the standard ASP model of server-side programming to the next level, by allowing the creation of fully compiled object-oriented web applications. These run at lightning fast speed and are easily designed to be highly scalable and modular.

The internet web site you are viewing is one of my first ASP.NET projects. It contains many hidden features that you may or may not have noticed at this stage including a great deal of focus on search-engine friendliness and easy content management.

ASP.NET is also known as "aspx" because of the filename extension used to differentiate it from standard ("classic") ASP pages.

My preferred flavour of ASP.NET is VB.NET, or Visual Basic.NET. The other principle .NET language is C# (C Sharp) - a Microsoft object-oriented variant of C - but the classic C++ is also available for the .NET platform.

Microsoft provide a sophisticated development environment for their .NET called Visual Studio. Amazingly, they provide a completely free version of this, honed specifically for ASP.NET web development, called Visual Web Developer Express 2008. It is available for download from the Microsoft web site.

Just one of the many great advantages of ASP.NET over classic ASP is it's advanced error handling facilities, which enable a programmer to catch SQL errors and other "exceptions" and avoid obscure error messages being shown to the user.