What is ASP.NET?

Question

I've been strictly in a C++ environment for years (and specialized statistical languages). Visual Studio until 2001, and Borland since. Mostly specialized desktop applications for clients.

I'm not remaining willfully ignorant of it, but over the years when I've dipped into other things, I've spent my time playing around with JavaScript, PHP, and a lot of Python.

Is "ASP.NET" the language? Is C# the language and "ASP.NET" the framework? What's a good answer to "What is ASP.NET"? Is there a correspondence between ASP.NET and anything I'd be familiar with in C++?

I know I can google the same title, but I'd rather see answers from this crowd. (Besides, in the future, I think that Google should point here for questions like that.)

Answer 1

I was going to write a lengthy answer but I felt that Wikipedia had it covered:

ASP.NET is a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft, that programmers can use to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language.

So ASP.NET is Microsoft's web development framework and the latest version is 4.0.

How do I get started? Check out the following resources:

• Learn ASP.NET
• ASP.NET Documentation
• ASP.NET Developer Center