Evolution / History of ASP.NET

Recently, I posted a video on our YouTube channel in which I have given brief information about the Evolution / History of ASP.NET. In this post, I am going to share the content which is shown during the presentation.

If you have not seen the video yet, I am adding the link so that you can watch it here. 

Evolution of ASP.NET (Quick Discussion on some of the popular Version(s) of ASP.NET)

Evolution of ASP.NET

• ASP (Active Server Pages) - 1996
• ASP.NET Web Forms - 2002
• ASP.NET MVC - 2009
• ASP.NET Core - 2016
• ASP.NET Core 2 - 2017
• ASP.NET Core 3.1 - 2019
• ASP.NET Core 5.0 - 2020

1. ASP (Active Server Pages)

• Known as Microsoft’s First Server Side Language.
• ASP was released in 1996 as part of IIS 3.0.
• ASP Pages are currently supported by all the version of IIS (Internet Information Services)
• ASP pages have .asp file extension.
• ASP is interpreted language means the compiler interprets the compiling code. 

2. ASP.NET Web Forms

• ASP.NET Web Forms lets us to build dynamic websites using a drag and drop, event-driven model.
• ASP.NET WebForms was released in 2002.
• ASP.NET Web Forms have efficient error handling support as compared to ASP.
• ASP Web Form pages have .aspx file extension.
• Validations in ASP.NET Web Forms can be easily implemented by setting up properties on the control. 

Drawbacks

• Code-behind and tightly coupled code make unit testing almost impossible.
• ViewState stored on the page which increases the size of the page and reduces the overall performance.
• Lack of separation of concerns (SoC).
• Lack of Code Reusability due to Code behind file and tightly coupled approach.

3. ASP.NET MVC

• ASP.NET MVC is a web application framework developed by Microsoft that implements MVC i.e. Model-View-Controller Pattern.
• It was released in 2009.
• It is Open Source Software.
• It is lightweight as compared to ASP.NET WebForms.
• Separation of Concerns and provides better support for the test-driven development.
• It does not use view state or server-based forms.

Drawbacks

• ASP.NET MVC uses .NET Framework and it requires Windows OS/Server for the build or deployment purpose.

4. ASP.NET Core

• ASP.NET Core is a Cross-Platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), high-performance, open-source framework for building modern, cloud-enabled, Internet-connected applications.
• It was released in 2016.
• Built-in Dependency Injection.
• It is lightweight and has a modular HTTP request pipeline.
• ASP.NET Core applications can run on the .NET Core Framework as well as on full .NET Framework (ASP.NET Core is composed of the .NET Standard Libraries). ASP.NET Core 2.X
• It was released in 2017.
• ASP.NET Core 2.0 has introduced the Razor Pages to create dynamic web applications.
• It comes with the “Microsoft.AspNetCore.All” package which is a meta-package for all the dependencies which are required to create ASP.NET Core 2.0 application.
• ASP.NET Core 2.0 target .NET Standard 2.0.

5. ASP.NET Core 3.1

• It was released in 2019.
• It has Partial class support for the Razor components.
• Pass parameter to top-level components.
• New component tag helper.
• Detailed error during Blazer Application Development.
• Breaking Changes for SameSite Cookies etc. 

6. ASP.NET Core 5.0

• It was released in 2020.
• .NET Core MVC & Razor page improvements.
• MVC Model binding improvements.
• Auto browser refresh with dotnet watch.
• Build-in OpenAPI and Swagger UI Support for Web APIs.

I am also sharing the presentation with the content (mentioned above) as well so that you can easily refer to it whenever required.

I hope this post will help you to understand the Evolution / History of ASP.NET.