Chapter 1. Introducing ASP.NET

When the first version of the .NET Framework was released nearly a decade ago, it was the start of a radical new direction in software design. Inspired by the best of Java, COM, and the Web, and informed by the mistakes and limitations of previous technologies, Microsoft set out to "hit the reset button" on their development platform. The result was a set of surprisingly mature technologies that developers could use to do everything from building a Windows application to executing a database query, and a web-site-building tool known as ASP.NET.

Today, ASP.NET is as popular as ever, but it's no longer quite as revolutionary. And, although the basic functionality that sits at the heart of ASP.NET is—surprisingly—virtually ...

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