The Internet has grown at an enormous rate over the past few years, and it has almost certainly affected the lives of most people who use computers. In only a few years,
the Internet has evolved from a platform for publishing “online brochures” to an
entire architecture for developing dynamic, distributed applications. Developing these applications was previously extremely difficult and tedious. The potential was huge,
but the tools consisted of nothing more than text editors in which applications would
be coded from scratch. This method of writing Web applications required extensive knowledge of the “plumbing” of the Internet, and there were a very limited number of languages to use. These factors made Web application programming available only to dedicated programmers who had the time to invest in learning rudimentary interfaces and unfamiliar programming languages.

Several projects and products now drastically simplify Web application development by providing easy-to-use object models and familiar, commonly used programming languages. Microsoft has been a leader in this field with its Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. With the latest release, ASP.NET, which is an
integral part of the .NET Framework, Microsoft has attempted to build a technology that will be very familiar to the millions of Visual Basic programmers. ASP.NET enables VB programmers to easily apply their Windows application programming skills to Web application programming without alienating existing ASP programmers—rather, it makes Web application development drastically simpler for them, too.
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