Building a Web Application

A web application in ASP.NET is a collection of pages, controls, code modules, and services all running under a single web server application directory (usually IIS). ASP.NET makes it really easy to build the types of dynamic web applications that exist everywhere on the Internet today. It provides a simple programming model based on the .NET Framework and several built-in controls and services that enable many of the common scenarios found in most applications, with very little effort or code. In this section we demonstrate the basic elements of a web application that we will use throughout the remainder of Quickstart tutorial, including:

* The ASP.NET Page Framework (Web Forms)
* Web and HTML Server Controls
* Shared Code Modules or Assemblies

This section also discusses a few improvements made to these application building blocks in ASP.NET 2.0 over previous versions of ASP.NET.