Ever since the fi rst release of the .NET Framework 1.0 in early 2002, Microsoft has put a lot
of effort and development time into ASP.NET, the part of the .NET Framework that enables
you to build rich web applications. This fi rst release meant a radical change from the older
Microsoft technology to build websites called Active Server Pages (ASP), now often referred to
as classic ASP. The introduction of ASP.NET 1.0 and the associated Visual Studio .NET gave
developers the following benefi ts over classic ASP: