What would be considered straight asp.net? (not mvc and not webforms)

Question

I know the difference between ASP.NET webforms and ASP.NET MVC and I've seen quite a few videos explaining that they both run on top of ASP.NET (and I've used both). However, my question is, how would one develop right on top of ASP.NET without webforms or mvc.net? Would this be the equivalent of having a project with only .ASHX files?

Answer 1

ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 originally consisted of a class library and templating markup (Web Forms). This was a natural extension of ASP 3.0, where HTML and VB code were intermixed in an .ASP file.

The class library is what I would consider the "straight" ASP.NET framework. IMHO, the System.Web namespace represents the efforts to incorporate "ASP" into the .NET framework. You get the top-level objects like HttpContext object and its static properties, as well as a couple objects that do the lifting of the ASP.NET processing pipeline, IHttpModule- and IHttpHandler-derived classes.

Ostensibly, you could invent your own markup language and write an HttpModule (among other components) to render the responses. This is probably why the System.Web namespace has grown to include code for Web Services, AJAX/JSON, MVC, and in .NET 3.5SP1, ASP.NET dynamic data.

My 2 cents.