For many developers ASP.NET and ASP.NET Web Forms are the same things. For some time I've been using Web Forms, but recently I learned that Web Forms is only build on top of ASP.NET. I become more curious how does a simple plain ASP.NET application look like. I learned about 3 ASP.NET programming models: Web Forms, Web Pages and MVC (Here Scott Hanselman explains briefly the differences). But it still seams that all the 3 approaches sits on top of ASP.NET.
I was trying to find an example application which uses pure ASP.NET, but I couldn't find anything.
I started to dig deeper into source code of ASP.NET web page and I found out that each web page is actually HTTP Handler (each page implements IHTTPHandler interface). Does it mean that pure ASP.NET application would be just a HTTP Handler implementation? Or am I missing something.
In my understanding ASP.NET Web Forms correspond to Win Forms in desktop world. But in the desktop world you can still write console application which doesn't use Win Forms. So what is an equivalent of console application in the web world?
Any comments or references appreciated. Thanks in advance.
ASP.NET is a very broad set of technologies, and it includes WebForms.. and as of MVC5, it also includes MVC, WebApi and WebPages. This is what Microsoft is now calling the "One ASP.NET" initiative.
These are all part of ASP.NET, just like ASP.NET is part of .NET. These are all just layers. There is no 'seperate' part called asp.net that does not contain these pieces (and even in earlier versions, there was no version of asp.net that did not include WebForms).
As such, there's no such thing as a "pure asp.net" app. You can certainly write an app that does not use WebForms (which means no .aspx or ascx or .master files, no Server Controls of any kind... essentially anything that exists in the System.Web.UI namespace.)
At most, you could consider this whatever is in the System.Web namespace (without any further levels of namespaces. Essentially what's here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.aspx )
So that would be things like the Request object, the Response object, Cookie handling, Membership, FormsAuthentication, etc... This is basic plumbing that isn't all that useful by itself. You would have to write a presentation framework of your own to sit on top of it.
There are other frameworks out there, such as FubuMVC, Nancy, MonoRail, etc... these are just like MVC or WebForms or WebPages... using the basic ASP.NET classes to do their job.
I would like to refer you, as an example, to ASP.NET MVC.
ASP.NET MVC is a framework on top of ASP.NET but is definitely not Web Forms (in fact, it replaces it completely, and to my opinion - for the best).
ASP.NET provides services common to web in general, things such as:
Handling requests and responses
Security, Authentication, Impersonation etc.
Maintaining an 'Application' (the notion of Global.asax for example as a framework around instansiating apps, shutting them down, handling central things such as Routes, handling uncaught exceptions etc.)
Taking care of hosting permissions
Physical & virtual apps
Interfacing with IIS (or other web servers) in general
Running Modules (in addition to HTTP Handlers)
Web Forms adds a presentation layer on top of ASP.NET's infrastructure. It provides things such as Forms, ViewState and such. "Translating" code-behind code to HTML representation for example. This are just few examples.
The separation between ASP.NET as an infrastructure and Web Forms as a presentation layer allowed creating ASP.NET MVC later on. ASP.NET MVC does not rely on 'Forms' at all, does not try to mimic WinForms development workflows (by obscuring raw HTML using code-behind "methods" and "properties" and such) and in fact provides a much better & correct way to do web development.
You were asking about pure ASP.NET. Here is an example of pure ASP.NET, no WebForms, no MVC. Here is one: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308001 . It's a basic HTTP Handler that, in this example, runs every time your browse to some address ending with .sync (by "teaching" ASP.NET to handle every request that uses that extension).
By the way, you can treat it as a "console" app (in your terms). It gets a URL, no matter where from (you can use curl if you like) and returns a text response, and that's all.
Related
Ive been confused about ASP.NET MVC.
As some said, MVC is better than ASP.NET. As some said, they are completely the same thing.
And my colleges debate that MVC is just an extension of asp.net, where asp.net is already in the form of MVC.
In fact I am starting web developing from scratch. If someone might help to clear the fog front of me, it would help a lot.
All ASP.NET web frameworks are build on top of Microsoft ASP.NET Framework. The unique feature of Web API is that it can be used with both MVC and WebForms applications to provide truly restful HTTP services.
Regarding the choice of suitable Asp.NET framework: you may get more information from official source - www.asp.net.
General rule of thumb is the architectural design how you want to build your application.
ASP.NET MVC promotes a cleaner separation which makes the developer think more in depth about design and code separation than traditional web forms.
There are endless debates about what is better but true benefits of ASP.NET MVC as
testability
more control over the rendered HTML
separation of concerns. However with MVC there is much more to learn for the developer.
ASP.NET WebForms - will always be around because some see it as a rapid application development tool. Just drag and drop and let ASP.NET handle the posting, state etc
ASP.NET Web API - is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. ASP.NET Web API is an ideal platform for building RESTful applications on the .NET Framework.
All in all, each of them has certain business solutions to be considered as required.
References to look for comparison:
ASP.NET MVC vs WebForms: speed and architecture comparison
ASP.NET Roadmap: One ASP.NET – Web Forms, MVC, Web API, and more
ASP.NET is the name of the overall web framework. There are a few different technologies that are built on ASP.NET. Two popular examples of these technologies are WebForms and MVC.
WebForms promotes a programming model that looks a lot more like Windows Forms. It attempts to abstract away the stateless nature of the web, and encourages you to use server-side controls instead of HTML. Because WebForms was the primary way to write web applications on ASP.NET for a long time before MVC came out, you'll often see people talk about "ASP.NET" as the same thing as WebForms. This is part of the reason for your confusion. ASP.NET WebForms is very different from ASP.NET MVC, but they are both built on ASP.NET.
ASP.NET MVC gets away from server-side controls. It eliminates the abstractions, allowing you to have closer control over the actual HTML that gets generated. For developers of modern applications, this is very useful because it makes it much easier to use AJAX and rich client-side javascript.
(Humble Opinion incoming)
ASP.NET (in terms of using Webforms) is programming the web for a WinForms developer. You "bind" events, you have "controls" and everything (sessionstate) is stored in a huge hidden field within the page so it knows where it left off from the previous call. You rely heavily on this information being present which is why everything you do needs to reside in that master form wrapping the entire page.
On the other hand, MVC is bringing C# .NET programming back to the web the way the web was intended. No bloat, no hidden fields, no heavy bindings. It's brings everything back to the classic "i have this form and now I need to process it". Arguably, the real magic is the routing methods and the "automatic binding" of submitted fields to an object. (if fields x, y & z are submitted and your action is looking for FooBar with the properties x, y & z it's automatically converted for you.
ASP.NET is common to both WEB-API and ASP.NET MVC. I assume you wonder about MVC or WEB-API.
MVC is a controller / model based with Views. Although the controllers can be used for AJAX json purposes. MVC is a good way to build a serious Browser based Application. The WEB-API allows you to build simple http server features, not necessarily Browser related. Good for REST style programming. Very flexible and a good alternative to WCF services. The are good tutorials on Both on the official ASP.NET site. START here http://www.asp.net/get-started
choose depends on your project n you. I suggest you to choose MVC because its productivity is very high we r using it since 1 year and found better than webforms.
for more knowledge please visit http://www.asp.net/mvc
The choice depends completely on you, I have been developing MVC application since 2010, its going to be over 2 years now have worked with almost all the versions of MVC both with Razor and aspx view. I have also worked on ASP.Net webform based applications.
With MVC you will not get built in controls, you will have to develop every control you want to use, you will have to rely mostly on html controls, while with web forms you will get advantage of using built in controls, Even getting help from other developers in your surroundings may be easy for webforms as you can easily get a webform developer.
But on the other hand with MVC the maintability is very high. As for as productivity is concerned, its very high once your are accustomed to it, initially it will be low as you will be in learning phase. Don't forget to use Entity Framework.
You may also consider developing your App using WebAPI, if it suits your scenario.
I'm a complete beginner when it comes to ASP.NET but I want to learn it in order to build a web application that eventually will communicate with a cloud hosted SQL server. However, I cannot find any information that outlines the difference between ASP.NET web application and ASP.NET MVC2 web application (in visual studio 2010) so I'm not sure where to start. Can anyone give me a simple explanation/outline so I can decide on a tutorial to follow?
Thanks
ASP.NET is a web platform. It provides a layer that sits on top of IIS (the web server) which facilitates the creation of web applications and web services. ASP.NET MVC is a framework specifically for building web applications. It sits ontop of ASP.NET and uses APIs provided by ASP.NET. ASP.NET Web Forms is another framework specifically for building web applications, and the new ASP.NET Web API is a platform for building web services.
ASP.NET, at its most basic level, provides a means for you to provide general HTML markup combined with server side "controls" within the event-driven programming model that can be leveraged with VB, C#, and so on. You define the page(s) of a site, drop in the controls, and provide the programmatic plumbing to make it all work.
ASP.NET MVC is an application framework based on the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern. This is what might be considered a "canned" framework for a specific way of implementing a web site, with a page acting as the "controller" and dispatching requests to the appropriate pages in the application. The idea is to "partition" the various elements of the application, eg business rules, presentation rules, and so on.
Think of the former as the "blank slate" for implementing a site architecture you've designed more or less from the ground up. MVC provides a mechanism for designing a site around a pre-determined "pattern" of application access, if that makes sense. There's more technical detail to it than that, to be sure, but that's the nickel tour for the purposes of the question.
Good luck!
ASP.NET MVC2 web application is based on MVC pattern in order to facilitate unit test, without mocking pipeline asp.net, because it's very difficult. you don't have code on Code Behind in order to separate your code graphic and your code functional.
With MVC your application become independent from view. you can replace easily technology of creating view.
Read this article it's very interesting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd942833.aspx
If you have VS10 make a small ASP.NET (webforms) application and a small ASP.NET MVC 2 application, and examine the differences between them. It's a great way to learn.
A very good material is available here
http://www.webdevelopmenthelp.net/2013/10/Difference-between-ASP.NET-WebForm-And-ASP.NET-MVC.html
Like ASP.Net web forms, ASP.Net MVC is development model to build web application in Microsoft .net framework. The major difference between them are ASP.net MVC is based on the MVC architecture. Where we have 3 independent tiers – Model, View Controllers which interact which each other to render HTML output.
Major differences
Web forms is mainly has an event driven model. Where we have page level events(Page_load, pre render, page_init etc) and control level events. Which is not the case for MVC. The request life cycle is comparatively complex.(why complex because, the request has to goes through all the events before rendering the HTML output )
Web forms is basically has an aspx page which contains UI controls and a code behind file. All the page level events and control level events are handled here. In MVC the View, Model , controller can exist independently (gives clear separation of concern)
The SOC makes it easier for development as we can have separate developers for View(design html) and controller (implement business logic)
Because of this tight coupling nature, web forms are not suitable for unit tests. In MVC we can write unit tests at both controller level, action method levels. Here we can mock the data to be passed to view and do assert the result from the action method for their different properties like view name, model properties, null check etc
In web forms we have state full behavior. The server controls in ASPX page uses view state to retain their state during request response cycle. Since this view states are stored as hidden controls inside the page itself, and they are sent during request and response cycle, it makes them more heavy. Absence of view state and state less nature of MVC make it more light weight. Hence they are much more faster in request lifecycle.
ASP.NET is a web platform. It provides a layer that sits on top of the web server which facilitates the creation of web applications and web services. ASP.NET is a framework specifically for building web applications. It sits of ASP.NET and uses APIs provided by ASP.NET. ASP.NET Web Forms is another framework specifically for building web applications, and the new ASP.NET Web API is a platform for building web services
ASP.NET is a 2 tier application in which no separate section for the database and MVC is a 3 tier application in which view and logic is kept separate.
In ASP.NET for each .aspx form one URL is generated, but in MVC the url's are generated based on the controller and by the router configuration.
The current codebase at work is entirely WebForms, with most logic being stuffed into the code-behind file. I'm investigating the possibility of using MVC3 for new pages added and future refactoring without having to throw the entire codebase away (a big no-no). All of these pages are part of the same "application" so it's not as simple as just creating new projects with MVC - they have to interact very closely, and in some cases WebForms pages will have to redirect to MVC pages, and vice versa.
I've come across a few articles that show how it's possible to integrate the two (albeit in very simple scenarios, while my scenario is fairly complex), but are there any issues to be aware of? Specifically in regards to going from a WebForms page to an MVC page and then back to a WebForms page, where data is required to be passed across pages say from the Session (and not necessarily read entirely from a database upon load), for example a workflow like:
(WebForms) User goes to CreateQuote.aspx?CustomerId=42 and enters some data. They click a "Process" button...
(MVC) /customers/42/process MVC page that reads in the information submitted before, and does some extra things. User hits a "Next" button...
(WebForms) CompleteQuote.aspx?CustomerId=42&QuoteId=534235 page that pulls out information from the previous MVC page and applies more logic to it.
Also, our existing project is an ASP.NET Web Site project (i.e. the one where every individual page is its own DLL); would it have to be converted to a Web Application project to exist side by side with MVC (that alone is a major refactoring effort due to large clumps of duplicate code across code-behind files)?
I would recommend you to avoid mixing ASP.NET MVC and classic WebForms in the same application. Keep them in separate projects and make them communicate through standard HTTP protocol mechanisms (query string parameters, form posts, cookies, ...). You could share authentication between them if they are hosted on the same domain. You could even share session objects between them even if they are hosted in separate application pools in IIS (not that you should be using session at all, but that's another topic).
As far as reusing the data access logic is concerned, well, depending on how properly your existing WebForms application is designed, you could share the assembly that contains your current data access code. And if your existing application is poorly designed with strong coupling between the different layers, you could wrap this legacy code behind a repository and still reuse at least the database access code.
By keeping your applications separate you don't need to pollute your new ASP.NET MVC application with references to some legacy code and you don't need to pollute your existing application classic WebForms application with ASP.NET MVC specific things.
I know the difference between ASP.NET webforms and ASP.NET MVC and I've seen quite a few videos explaining that they both run on top of ASP.NET (and I've used both). However, my question is, how would one develop right on top of ASP.NET without webforms or mvc.net? Would this be the equivalent of having a project with only .ASHX files?
ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 originally consisted of a class library and templating markup (Web Forms). This was a natural extension of ASP 3.0, where HTML and VB code were intermixed in an .ASP file.
The class library is what I would consider the "straight" ASP.NET framework. IMHO, the System.Web namespace represents the efforts to incorporate "ASP" into the .NET framework. You get the top-level objects like HttpContext object and its static properties, as well as a couple objects that do the lifting of the ASP.NET processing pipeline, IHttpModule- and IHttpHandler-derived classes.
Ostensibly, you could invent your own markup language and write an HttpModule (among other components) to render the responses. This is probably why the System.Web namespace has grown to include code for Web Services, AJAX/JSON, MVC, and in .NET 3.5SP1, ASP.NET dynamic data.
My 2 cents.
Where do web services fit into this? A service isn't really a form nor is it MVC, so that would also be on the list of other things you could do with ASP.Net.
New answer: I actually took the time to look up Microsoft's official answer.
ASP.NET is a unified Web development
model that includes the services
necessary for you to build
enterprise-class Web applications with
a minimum of coding. ASP.NET is part
of the .NET Framework, and when coding
ASP.NET applications you have access
to classes in the .NET Framework. You
can code your applications in any
language compatible with the common
language runtime (CLR), including
Microsoft Visual Basic, C#, JScript
.NET, and J#. These languages enable
you to develop ASP.NET applications
that benefit from the common language
runtime, type safety, inheritance, and
so on.
ASP.NET includes:
A page and controls framework
The ASP.NET compiler
Security infrastructure
State-management facilities
Application configuration
Health monitoring and performance
features
Debugging support
An XML Web services framework
Extensible hosting environment and
application life cycle management
An extensible designer environment
You can use an IHttpHandler to intercept raw web requests from IIS and give any responces back whether it is a webform, image, file or whatever. which I guess could be considered basic ASP.NET without a WebForm or MVC. Problem using IHttpHandler
Asp.Net encompasses the System.Web namespace. Webforms is the System.Web.UI namespace. One of the critical differences is that the classes within System.Web.UI typically do not emit standards based html and SEO can be a nightmare.
Asp.Net on it's own can provide a basic templating system similar to many other web frameworks and the developer can make complete websites without using any WebForms controls. This is an atypical situation however because the typical Asp.Net development process, prior to Asp.Net Ajax and Asp.Net MVC anyway, was to use the controls in the toolbox.
We currently have a classic ASP.NET web application which serves as our API. It basically has a bunch of ASMX Web Services, but these are really cumbersome to work with from JavaScript. What I want is to expose a set of RESTful endpoints, but doing this in classis ASP.NET is not what I really want to do.
I'm considering to combine both classic ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC in one web app. Is this possible at all? If yes, what are the issues/problems I may encounter?
Aha! It seems that this is very much possible. Here's a comprehensive article which describes what should be done.
An ASP.NET Webforms application can become ASP.NET MVC enabled by following some simple steps,its quite easy infact see this link
if you want to go rest for mvc heres a article Rest for mvc by Phil Haack and Rest like nature of MVC heres a comparison Rest in asp net vs wcf
The whole goal of routing is to break
the one-to-one association between
URLs and files in the server’s file
system. However, the routing system
still does check the file system to
see if an incoming URL happens to
match a file or disk, and if so,
routing ignores the request (bypassing
any route entries that the URL might
also match) so that the file will be
served directly.
So, to answer on a part of your question "is this possible at all": Yes, because routing system will recognize the .asmx file on the file system and it will process it in classic asp.net web services manner.
For the second question I'm not sure because I haven't been doing anything complex with web service inside of the asp.net mvc application.