ASP.NET 2.0

Good looking websites

ASP.NET gives you everything you need to create professional looking web pages.

You can use Master Pages to ensure a common layout across all pages of your web site. Change the Master Page, and all pages will automatically reflect the changes.

Themes allow you to bring together all of the styles, skins, and images that give a web site its look and feel. You or your web site’s visitor can change the site’s appearance as simply as selecting another Theme.

If you use ASP.NET your web site will comply with international web standards such as XHTML and will support many accessibility conventions.

Interactive web pages

ASP.NET empowers you to create all the elements of a professional web site, from search pages and visitor comments through to shopping carts and community forums.

Web Parts allow you to divide a web page into components that visitors can show, hide, or rearrange, allowing each visitor to personalize his or her view of your web site.

If you have seen a clever effect somewhere on the web, chances are good that you can add the same capability to your own web site with the new ASP.NET AJAX framework, currently known as “Atlas”.

Working with databases

A common feature of today’s web sites is the ability to show and update information in a database. The good news is that ASP.NET makes it so incredibly easy to work with databases that often you will not need to write a single line of code.

Easy programming model

ASP.NET uses an event-driven control model that will be familiar to all Windows developers. This model is complemented by an HTML-like declarative programming style that will be familiar to existing web developers. So no matter what your background, you will find yourself immediately productive using ASP.NET.

Extensible architecture

For developers seeking to get the most out of their web applications, ASP.NET provides multiple extension points.

The overall execution pipeline uses pass-through Modules and end-point Handlers, each of which can be removed, extended, or replaced through simple configuration settings.

A bedrock of application services, such as user management and site navigation, uses a flexible provider model that allows developers to completely customize the behaviour of an ASP.NET application.

ASP.NET makes available an extensive collection of controls, spanning input and validation controls to rich data presentation controls, all of which are extendable and configurable.

Security, performance and scalability

The ASP.NET infrastructure provides the services needed to protect your web applications from many forms of hacker attacks including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and request-replay attacks.

From its super-fast runtime to its flexible caching, ASP.NET can substantially improve the performance of your web applications.

ASP.NET’s smart use of resources and support for server web farms ensures that web applications can scale to meet the most intensive user demands.

Web services

ASP.NET is not just for web sites and web applications, with extensive support provided for creating and consuming web services.