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ASP.NET Versions


Introduction:

This blog compares the various versions of ASP.NET since its evolution and provides an outlook to some of their key features including the latest version of ASP.NET 4.5.

ASP.NET 4.5: Changes made to core Runtime and Framework: Some key features are -
  • Asynchronous reading and writing HTTP requests and responses.
     
  • Improvements to HttpRequests handling
     
  • Asynchronous HttpModules and HttpHandlers
     
  • Strongly Typed Data Controls
     
  • Javascript Editor
     
  • Performance improvement for Web Hosting

ASP.NET 4.0: New Features like:
  • Browser Detection Updated: Updated browser definition files i.e. server side engine can recognize some of the latest browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Mobile browsers, etc.
     
  • Session State Compression: Enables the gzip compression of the data passed to an out of process session state service.
     
  • Opt in View State: Turn of the View state for entire page and then optionally Opt in for specific controls you want.
     
  • Extensible Caching: Some new types of cache storage exposed like distributed caching solutions such as Windows Server AppFabric, etc.
     
  • The Chart Control: Supports a range of 2D and 3D graphs
     
  • ASP.NET MVC: Offers different way to build web pages. Some advantages over web form model are: Test Driven development, Control over HTML markup, control over urls.
     
  • ASP.NET Dynamic Data: A template based, componentized, a customizable framework to quickly build a data driven application.
     
  • SilverLight: To create richer pages like providing 2D graphics, animations, etc.
     
  • Consistent XHTML Rendering: ASP.NET 4.0 smooth out rendering of ASP.NET web pages as XHTML documents.

ASP.NET 3.5: Support of LINQ in ASP.NET like binding the results of LINQ to Data Source Controls

ASP.NET AJAX

ASP.NET 3.0: No Changes

ASP.NET 2.0: Added new features like:
  • Master Pages
  • Themes
  • Navigation controls
  • Security and Memberships
  • Data Source Controls
  • Web Parts
  • Profiles

ASP.NET 1.0/1.1: Introduction of Web Form Model - ASP.NET initiates the Page object and then instantiates various ASP.NET control objects that goes through the ASP.NET page life cycle