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Technical articles:
why .net?
A desktop PC is boring, much as a single-cell
amoeba is boring. Sure, you can
use it to play a mean game of Solitaire and it
won’t let you cheat and Notepad comes in
handy on occasion. But unlike the evolutionary
value of the amoeba, the economic benefits to
society of the stand-alone desktop PC have yet
to be satisfactorily proven It.That’s what
Microsoft .NET is—prefabricated infrastructure
for solving common
problems in Internet applications. Microsoft .NET
has been getting an enormous amount of publicity
lately, even for this industry. Not because they
can’t pass up a bargain off-season airfare,
even if it’s not somewhere they want to
go, It was to hear about Microsoft .NET for the
first time. A new programming model for constructing
HTML pages, named ASP.NET. Even
though intelligent single-use programs are on
the rise, most Internet traffic for the nearto
middle-term future will use a generic browser
as a front end. This requires a server to construct
a page using the HTML language that browsers understand
and can display to a user. ASP.NET (the next version
of Active Server Pages) is a new environment that
runs on Internet Information Services (IIS) and
makes it much easier for programmers to write
code that constructs HTML-based Web pages for
browser viewing. ASP.NET features a
new language-independent way of writing code and
tying it to Web page requests. It features .NET
Web Forms, which is an event-driven programming
model of interacting with controls that makes
programming a Web page feel very much like programming
a Visual Basic form. ASP.NET contains good session
state management and security features. It is
more robust and contains many performance enhancements
over original ASP.
A new way for Internet servers to expose functions
to any client, named XML Web services. While generic
browsers will remain important, I think that the
future really belongs to dedicated applications
and appliances. The Web will become more of a
place where, instead of data being rendered in
a generic browser, a dedicated client (say,Napster,
for music searching) will make cross-Internet
function calls to a server and receive data to
be displayed in a dedicated user interface or
perhaps without a user interface at all for machine-to-machine
communications. Microsoft .NET provides a new
set of services that allows a server to expose
its functions to any client on any machine
running any operating system. The client makes
calls to the server using the Internet’s
lowest common denominator of XML and HTTP.
-mahesh
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