What is Server-Side Programming

To understand why ASP.NET was created, it helps to understand the problems of early web development technologies. With the original CGI standard, for example, the web server must launch a completely separate instance of the application for each web request. If the website is popular, the web server struggles under the weight of hundreds of separate copies of the application, eventually becoming a victim of its own success. Furthermore, technologies such as CGI provide a bare-bones programming environment. If you want higher-level features, like the ability to authenticate users, store personalized information, or display records you’ve retrieved from a database, you need to write pages of code from scratch. Building a web application this way is tedious and error-prone.
To counter these problems, Microsoft created higher-level development platforms, such as ASP and ASP.NET. Both of these technologies allow developers to program dynamic web pages without worrying about the low-level implementation details. For that reason, both platforms have been incredibly successful.
The original ASP platform garnered a huge audience of nearly one million developers, becoming far more popular than even Microsoft anticipated. It wasn’t long before it was being wedged into all sorts of unusual places, including mission-critical business applications and highly trafficked e-commerce sites. Because ASP wasn’t designed with these uses in mind, performance, security, and configuration problems soon appeared.
That’s where ASP.NET comes into the picture. ASP.NET was developed as an industrial strength web application framework that could address the limitations of ASP. Compared to classic ASP, ASP.NET offers better performance, better design tools, and a rich set of ready-made features. ASP.NET was wildly popular from the moment it was released—in fact, it was put to work in dozens of large-scale commercial websites while still in beta form.