ASP.NET is a new programming framework from Microsoft for developing next generation web Applications. It is a framework built on the Common Language Runtime and introduces a new paradigm to server-side Web development.

The code written in ASP.NET is compiled, so straight ahead it is a performance boost. The code written in .Net Framework is complied in Common Language Runtime. ASP.NET can take advantage of early binding, just-in-time compilation, automatic resource optimization, runtime profiling, automatic memory management, enhanced exception handling, and caching services, right out-of-the-box, this improves the performance before you start coding. A problem with Web site's performance is with data-access.

For example, a database table will spend the majority of its execution time connecting to the database and querying the information.

ASP.NET comes with a data-caching module. This data-caching module allows you to specify what data on an ASP page to cache and on what conditions to empty the cache and re-query the data-store.

Active Server Pages .NET provides the most advanced web development platform created to date. While there are plenty of familiar features from classic ASP, there have been some significant changes made to the ASP.NET architecture. Some of the improvements and new features are listed below.

Web Forms are an ASP.NET technology that you use to create programmable Web pages. They can present information, using any markup language, to the user in any browser and use code on the server to implement application logic. Web Forms programming is modeled after the way Visual Basic developers write traditional Windows based applications. Constructing a Windows form in Visual Basic requires adding a form to the project, dragging a control onto the form, and then double-clicking on the control to write code behind the form. This well-known model is used by millions of developers to rapidly construct desktop applications. Web Forms brings the same design principles and level of productivity to the Web.

Web server controls are a major component of the Web Forms programming model and provide powerful server-side programmability. These server controls provide a rich event-driven programming model similar to that of Visual Basic.

Web services are discrete units of programmatic functionality exposed to clients using HTTP and XML as the communications protocols and data formats. By communicating over HTTP, Web services overcome the problem of communicating across corporate firewalls without having to implement solutions that require additional communications ports to be opened to external access.

ASP.NET provides a powerful new caching engine that allows developers to improve the performance of their applications by reducing both the web server and database server loads.

ASP.NET now has the ability to support sessions in browsers that do not use cookies. Additionally, the session can be stored either in-process or out-of-process. Hosting the session state out-of-process allows the session state to be independent of the ASP.NET worker process. The out-of-process session can be stored in ASP.NETs own state-server service, or within a SQL Server database.