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Basic Technologies involved in .NET Development and Programming

ASP.NET, C# and VB.NET Programming Benefits - Core Advantages of .NET Programming

Benefits of .NET Application Software

1. Agile Architecture

Realize new business opportunities
XML Web services provide an agile application architecture both internally and externally, making integration of applications across the intranet or Internet simple. They enable you to integrate with your applications, suppliers and customers. The .NET Framework is designed from the ground up to use XML Web services as its native communication mechanism.

Reduce time to market
The .NET Framework enables you to leverage existing applications, developer skills, and IT skills to build out your IT infrastructure faster than ever before. Deep runtime capabilities enable you to easily turn existing applications into XML Web services without rewriting or even recompiling.

Deliver excellent TCO
Windows already delivers some of the best total cost of ownership. The .NET Framework builds on that – improving application reliability, security, deployment, and performance –  enabling you to run applications on high-volume, low-cost hardware.

Protect current investments
The .NET Framework is built on XML and Global XML Web Services Architecture of integration standards. Its core, C# and the CLI, is being standardized in ECMA, protecting your investment by enabling other companies to implement the .NET Framework.

2. Rapid Development

Use any programming language
The .NET Framework enables developers to use any programming language and integrate applications written in different programming languages, enabling current development skills to go forward without retraining.

Take advantage of leading tools
Many .NET Framework features were designed specifically to improve the quality of the tools that use it, such as integrated debugging and profiling. Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, the leading development environment, is built to take advantage of the .NET Framework.

Write less code
The .NET Framework uses a highly componentized, plumbing-free design that enables developers to focus on writing business logic. Developers can utilize dozens of built-in controls for common tasks such as shopping carts and treeviews or tabviews and don’t need to write IDL or Registry code.

Employ Windows Application Services
Windows® .NET Server and Windows 2000 Server have the most advanced application services available: the fastest transaction monitor and message queuing engine, the most advanced data access subsystem, the best Web server. The .NET Framework takes advantage of these. For example, .NET Framework transactions are COM+ transactions, and all the new COM+ capabilities in Windows .NET can be used from the .NET Framework.

3. Improved Operations

Improve performance
The .NET Framework improves the performance of typical Web applications. ASP.NET includes advanced compilation and caching features that improve performance by a factor of two to three over existing Active Server Pages applications.

Simplify application deployment
With the .NET Framework metadata technology, installing applications is as easy as copying them into a directory, and “DLL Hell” is eliminated. The .NET Framework is even capable of self-healing when applications are damaged, and applications can be upgraded while they are running.

Run more reliable applications
The .NET Framework includes technologies to make applications more reliable. For example, memory, threads, and processes are managed by the .NET Framework to ensure that memory leaks don’t occur. And ASP.NET monitors running Web applications and can automatically restart them at administrator-defined intervals.

Be confident with evidence- and role-based security
The .NET Framework security system provides fine-grained, method-level control over what applications can and can’t do based on who wrote the code, what it’s trying to do, where it was installed from, and who is trying to run it.

Reasons to use .NET Framework

1. Run Existing and Forthcoming .NET Framework Applications A tremendous number of corporations and independent software vendors (ISVs) have already released applications built using the .NET Framework. Many more organizations are on the way. To tap into this wide range of rich functionality, you must have the have the .NET Framework Redistributable installed on your machines.
2. Richer End-User Experiences Applications built using the .NET Framework can take advantage of cutting-edge, rich user interface (UI) technologies and integrate deeply with other applications and systems available on the target machine or through the network. These applications maximize usability and user empowerment.
3. Improved Reliability Isolation of applications built using the .NET Framework and automatic version control of components built using the .NET Framework help prevent versioning conflicts. Additionally, Web applications and XML Web services built using the .NET Framework automatically detect and recover from errors such as deadlocks and memory leaks to ensure application availability.
4. Increased Performance Thanks in part to advanced compilation and caching techniques, server applications are faster than ever with the .NET Framework and Microsoft ASP.NET technology. Customers who have moved from ASP to ASP.NET are seeing significant increases in speed—on the order of 300-500 percent improvements—and much lower CPU utilization.
5. Stronger Security The .NET Framework gives system administrators powerful, granular security control over applications built using the programming model, taking the burden off end-users. Systems administrators can set policies mandating that applications originating from a particular location or bearing a particular digital signature or Authenticode publisher signature should only be allowed to access certain resources and perform certain operations. Security policies can easily be set up around virtually anything that concerns systems administrators, including application directories, environment variables on the local machine, databases, other servers on the network, and printers. You can develop these security policies using the .NET Framework Configuration Tool, an easy-to-use MMC snap-in that enables you to convert your policies to MSI files that can be distributed across an enterprise.
6. Ease of Deployment The .NET Framework makes it easier than ever to deploy and update applications. Deploy applications to a client or server machine simply by copying the application directory to the target machine—no registration is required. Thanks to .NET Framework no-touch deployment technology, Microsoft Windows®-based applications can now be deployed and updated simply by copying the necessary components to a Web server that can be accessed by your end-users.
7. Integration with Existing Systems The .NET Framework was built with integration in mind. Applications built using the .NET Framework can connect with existing systems and packaged applications, regardless of their underlying platform, via XML Web services or via other system-specific connectors. This means closer links and better information-sharing between systems internal to an enterprise, as well as between the enterprise and its partners, suppliers, and customers.
8. Maximum Scalability The .NET Framework technology for interacting with data, Microsoft ADO.NET, is designed for today's Web-based style of data access. Using ADO.NET, developers have the option of working with a platform-neutral, XML-based cache of the requested data instead of directly manipulating the database. This approach to data access frees up database connections and results in significantly greater scalability. Additionally, the .NET Framework session state technology makes it easy to share user-specific session information across a Web farm. This way, a user can hit different servers in the Web farm over multiple requests and still have full access to his or her session.
9. Improved Support for Instrumentation The .NET Framework provides rich, developer-friendly support for integrating applications with management infrastructure and tools. This, in turn, makes it easy for systems administrators to monitor and maintain these applications effectively.
     Easy, Flexible Management Applications built using the .NET Framework can be managed easily using either scriptable command line tools or MMC snap-ins. Application configuration information is contained in XML files, which can be edited and updated using any text editor.

.NET Security

The .NET Framework includes a large variety of security features commensurate with the breadth of the platform itself. For managing user identity, Role-based security provides a unified model for authorization and authentication of principals based on identity and roles. Additionally, ASP.NET provides additional customization and functionality specifically targeted at web application security requirements.

For all managed code on the platform, server or client, Evidence-based security applies different levels of trust to all running code and enforces security accordingly. This enables semi-trusted code to be safely executed subject to restrictions that can be controlled by the administrator. A new managed library of cryptography functions is provided, including direct support for XML digital signatures. The following sections describe each of these areas in more detail.

Role-based security

The .NET Framework introduces a unified model for managing user (or automated agent) identity and roles for authorization. The model is based on the notion of a principal as the user on whose behalf code is executing. Authentication is the process of examining credentials (e.g. name/password) and establishing identity of the principal. In addition to identity, a principal may have zero or more roles to which it belongs, representing authorizations. Application code can then learn the identity of the current principal, or query it for a particular role as necessary to perform some privileged operation.

For enterprises, the Windows logon identity of users is an important form of identity for security, so WindowsPrincipal is provided to handle the authentication. Windows user name becomes the principal identity, and the groups the user belongs to are the names of the roles assigned.
A generic principal object is defined for applications that define their own authentication and authorization, such as by looking up password and list of roles in an application-specific database. Custom principals can be defined providing further customization.

Web application security

ASP.NET has been built with security in mind. ASP.NET leverages Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) to provide strong support for common HTTP authentication schemes including support for Basic, Digest, NTLM, Kerberos, and SSL/TLS client certificates.ASP.NET also supports Microsoft Passport authentication and provides a convenient implementation of Forms-based (Cookie) authentication. Regardless of which authentication scheme is employed, developers get a consistent programming and authorization model.

ASP.NET supports traditional methods of performing access control and also provides URL authorization, which allows administrators to provide XML configuration that allows or denies access to URLs based on the current user or role. Developers can code explicit authorization checks easily into their application or can take advantage of the common language runtime's support for declarative security to include control access to methods based on the calling user or role.

ASP.NET has an extensible security architecture that allows the developer to write custom authentication or authorization providers. These providers can handle authentication and authorization events in the application-level global.asax file or developers can write a module that can be reused across applications. In addition to built-in support for doing role-based security with Windows users and groups, ASP.NET applications can easily provide application defined roles.

Evidence-based security

In addition to trust of users, trust of code with consequent restrictions enforced on it is also critical to achieve good security in the .NET application space. Managed code running on the .NET Framework can be restricted to only use well-defined interfaces, which allows security to be effectively enforced on the code. This allows large applications composed of many components to be safely deployed, with varying degrees of security enforced against the various components, all running in-process. This enables a number of possibilities not formerly available to applications:
mobile code can be downloaded from unsecured sources and executed safely with restrictions
ISP server hosts can run different site applications together in-process safely, increasing performance server applications can be extended with user-written code that runs constrained to not interfere with overall server operation programmable applications can safely run macro script associated with user documents.

Before any managed code runs, the security policy system determines what permissions to grant it based on evidence about the code assembly and what the code itself requests. Evidence can be anything known about the code: any valid digital signatures, the URL, site, or zone the code comes from, and so forth. Security policy configured by the administrator or user specifies rules of using evidence to determine permissions to grant to code. After ensuring that the minimum permissions the code requests can be given, and excluding permissions the code does not want, permissions are granted and the code runs limited by what the permissions allow it to do. If policy would grant code less than the minimum it requests, then the code is not run. The permission request also allows the code to be examined at deployment time to learn what permissions the developer declared it needs.

Most application code does not need to explicitly use the evidence-based security, which is usually handled by the lowest levels of the standard class libraries, nonetheless all this application code benefits from the security being there. For example, running low-trust code from the Internet you are protected from that code being able to somehow call into more trusted code installed on the machine and using it in a malicious way.

The one thing that many such applications will want to do with security is to include a permission request: this assures that your code will only run if it gets the permissions it expects it will have, and no more. Other situations evidence-based security can help your code include:

limited access public API: you can decorate a type or method as requiring certain permission or evidence in order to call or subclass it. For example, to make a public API that only other code from your web site can call or only code signed with a certain key can use.
resource protection: when you define a class library that exposes a resource that needs protection, you can define a permission and use the security policy system to restrict access.

Client Application Development

In the past, developers created such applications using C/C++ in conjunction with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) or with a rapid application development (RAD) environment such as Microsoft® Visual Basic®. The .NET Framework incorporates aspects of these existing products into a single, consistent development environment that drastically simplifies the development of client applications.

The Windows Forms classes contained in the .NET Framework are designed to be used for GUI development. You can easily create command windows, buttons, menus, toolbars, and other screen elements with the flexibility necessary to accommodate shifting business needs.

For example, the .NET Framework provides simple properties to adjust visual attributes associated with forms. In some cases the underlying operating system does not support changing these attributes directly, and in these cases the .NET Framework automatically recreates the forms. This is one of many ways in which the .NET Framework integrates the developer interface, making coding simpler and more consistent.

Unlike ActiveX controls, Windows Forms controls have semi-trusted access to a user's computer. This means that binary or natively executing code can access some of the resources on the user's system (such as GUI elements and limited file access) without being able to access or compromise other resources. Because of code access security, many applications that once needed to be installed on a user's system can now be safely deployed through the Web. Your applications can implement the features of a local application while being deployed like a Web page.

Server Application Development

Server-side applications in the managed world are implemented through runtime hosts. Unmanaged applications host the common language runtime, which allows your custom managed code to control the behavior of the server. This model provides you with all the features of the common language runtime and class library while gaining the performance and scalability of the host server.

The following illustration shows a basic network schema with managed code running in different server environments. Servers such as IIS and SQL Server can perform standard operations while your application logic executes through the managed code.

ASP.NET is the hosting environment that enables developers to use the .NET Framework to target Web-based applications. However, ASP.NET is more than just a runtime host; it is a complete architecture for developing Web sites and Internet-distributed objects using managed code. Both Web Forms and XML Web services use IIS and ASP.NET as the publishing mechanism for applications, and both have a collection of supporting classes in the .NET Framework.

XML Web services, an important evolution in Web-based technology, are distributed, server-side application components similar to common Web sites. However, unlike Web-based applications, XML Web services components have no UI and are not targeted for browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Instead, XML Web services consist of reusable software components designed to be consumed by other applications, such as traditional client applications, Web-based applications, or even other XML Web services. As a result, XML Web services technology is rapidly moving application development and deployment into the highly distributed environment of the Internet.

If you have used earlier versions of ASP technology, you will immediately notice the improvements that ASP.NET and Web Forms offers. For example, you can develop Web Forms pages in any language that supports the .NET Framework. In addition, your code no longer needs to share the same file with your HTTP text (although it can continue to do so if you prefer). Web Forms pages execute in native machine language because, like any other managed application, they take full advantage of the runtime. In contrast, unmanaged ASP pages are always scripted and interpreted. ASP.NET pages are faster, more functional, and easier to develop than unmanaged ASP pages because they interact with the runtime like any managed application.

The .NET Framework also provides a collection of classes and tools to aid in development and consumption of XML Web services applications. XML Web services are built on standards such as SOAP (a remote procedure-call protocol), XML (an extensible data format), and WSDL ( the Web Services Description Language). The .NET Framework is built on these standards to promote interoperability with non-Microsoft solutions.

For example, the Web Services Description Language tool included with the .NET Framework SDK can query an XML Web service published on the Web, parse its WSDL description, and produce C# or Visual Basic source code that your application can use to become a client of the XML Web service. The source code can create classes derived from classes in the class library that handle all the underlying communication using SOAP and XML parsing. Although you can use the class library to consume XML Web services directly, the Web Services Description Language tool and the other tools contained in the SDK facilitate your development efforts with the .NET Framework.
If you develop and publish your own XML Web service, the .NET Framework provides a set of classes that conform to all the underlying communication standards, such as SOAP, WSDL, and XML. Using those classes enables you to focus on the logic of your service, without concerning yourself with the communications infrastructure required by distributed software development.

Finally, like Web Forms pages in the managed environment, your XML Web service will run with the speed of native machine language using the scalable communication of IIS.

Web Services Overview

A Web Service is programmable application logic accessible using standard Internet protocols. Web Services combine the best aspects of component-based development and the Web. Like components, Web Services represent black-box functionality that can be reused without worrying about how the service is implemented. Unlike current component technologies, Web Services are not accessed via object-model-specific protocols, such as the distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Remote Method Invocation (RMI), or Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). Instead, Web Services are accessed via ubiquitous Web protocols and data formats, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Furthermore, a Web Service interface is defined strictly in terms of the messages the Web Service accepts and generates. Consumers of the Web Service can be implemented on any platform in any programming language, as long as they can create and consume the messages defined for the Web Service interface.

There are a few key specifications and technologies you are likely to encounter when building or consuming Web Services. These specifications and technologies address five requirements for service-based development:

· A standard way to represent data
· A common, extensible, message format
· A common, extensible, service description language
· A way to discover services located on a particular Web site
· A way to discover service providers

XML is the obvious choice for a standard way to represent data. Most Web Service-related specifications use XML for data representation, as well as XML Schemas to describe data types.

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) defines a lightweight protocol for information exchange. Part of the SOAP specification defines a set of rules for how to use XML to represent data. Other parts of the SOAP specification define an extensible message format, conventions for representing remote procedure calls (RPCs) using the SOAP message format, and bindings to the HTTP protocol. (SOAP messages can be exchanged over other protocols, but the current specification only defines bindings for HTTP.) Microsoft anticipates that SOAP will be the standard message format for communicating with Web Services.

Given a Web Service, it would be nice to have a standard way to document what messages the Web Service accepts and generates—that is, to document the Web Service contract. A standard mechanism makes it easier for developers and developer tools to create and interpret contracts. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML-based contract language jointly developed by Microsoft and IBM. We anticipate that WSDL will be widely supported by developer tools for creating Web Services.

Developers will also need some way to discover Web Services. The Discovery Protocol (Disco) specification defines a discovery document format (based on XML) and a protocol for retrieving

the discovery document, enabling developers to discover services at a known URL. However, in many cases the developer will not know the URLs where services can be found. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specifies a mechanism for Web Service providers to advertise the existence of their Web Services and for Web Service consumers to locate Web Services of interest.

This diagram, as well as the definition of Web Services just provided, is concerned with the external appearance of the Web Services. After all, we've said that as long as a client application can create and consume the appropriate messages, it doesn't need to know anything about the internals of the Web Services it uses. Developers of Web Services will obviously care about the internal structure as well.

ASP.NET is a compiled .NET-based environment; you can author applications in any .NET compatible language, including Visual Basic, C# and Jscript.NET. Additionally, the entire .NET Framework platform is available to any ASP.NET application. Developers can easily access the benefits of these technologies, which include a managed Common Language Runtime environment, type safety, inheritance, and so on.

ASP.NET has been designed to work seamlessly with WYSIWYG HTML editors and other programming tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. Not only does this make Web development easier, but it also provides all the benefits that these tools have to offer, including a GUI that developers can use to drop server controls onto a Web page, as well as fully integrated debugging support.

Developers can choose from three programming models when creating an ASP.NET application, or combine these in any way they see fit.

• Web Forms allows you to build powerful powerful forms-based Web pages. When building these pages, you can use Web Forms controls to create common UI elements and program them for common tasks. These controls allow you to rapidly build up a Web Form out of reusable built-in or custom components, simplifying the code of a page.
• A Web service is a way to access server functionality remotely. Using services, businesses can expose programmatic interfaces to their data or business logic, which in turn can be obtained and manipulated by client and server applications. Web services enable the exchange of data in client-server or server-server scenarios, using standards like HTTP and XML messaging to move data across firewalls. Web services are not tied to a particular component technology or object-calling convention. As a result, programs written in any language, using any component model, and running on any operating system can access Web services.

Both of these options can take full advantage of all ASP.NET features, as well as the power of the .NET Framework and .NET Framework Common Language Runtime.

• ASP.NET not only takes advantage of performance enhancements found in the .NET Framework and runtime, it has also been designed to offer significant performance improvements over ASP and other Web development platforms. All ASP.NET code is compiled rather than interpreted, which allows early binding, strong typing, and just-in-time (JIT) compiling to native code, to name only a few of its benefits. ASP.NET is also easily factorable, meaning that developers can remove modules (a session module, for instance) that are not relevant to the application being developed. ASP.NET also provides extensive caching services, both built-in and caching APIs. ASP.NET also ships with Performance Counters that developers and system administrators can monitor to test new applications and gather metrics on existing ones.
• ASP.NET configuration settings are stored in XML-based files, which are human readable and writable. Each of your applications can have a distinct configuration file and you can extend the configuration scheme to suit your requirements.
• ASP.NET provides easy-to-use Application and Session state facilities that are familiar to ASP developers and are readily compatible with all other .NET Framework APIs.
• The .NET Framework and ASP.NET provide default authorization and authentication schemes for Web applications. You can easily remove, add to, or replace these schemes depending upon the needs of your application.
• cpconHTTPRuntimeSupport 
• Accessing databases from ASP.NET applications is an often-used technique for displaying data to Web site visitors. ASP.NET makes it easier than ever to access databases for this purpose - and provides for managing the data in the database.
• ASP.NET provides a simple framework that enables Web developers to write logic that runs at the application level. Developers can write this code in either the global.asax text file or in a compiled class deployed as an assembly. This logic can include application-level events, but developers can easily extend this framework to suit the needs of their Web application. ASP application code, written in the global.asa file, is completely supported in ASP.NET.
• ASP.NET offers complete syntax and processing compatibility with ASP applications. Developers simply need to change file extensions from .asp to .aspx to migrate their files to the ASP.NET framework. They can also easily add ASP.NET functionality to their applications with ease, sometimes by simply adding just a few lines of code to their ASP files.

Visual Basic.NET is the next version of Visual Basic. Rather than simply adding some new features to Visual Basic 6.0, Microsoft has reengineered the product to make it easier than ever before to write distributed applications such as Web and enterprise n-tier systems. Visual Basic.NET has two new forms packages (Windows Forms and Web Forms); a new version of ADO for accessing disconnected data sources; and streamlined language, removing legacy keywords, improving type safety, and exposing low-level constructs that advanced developers require.

These new features open new doors for the Visual Basic developer: With Web Forms and ADO.NET, you can now rapidly develop scalable Web sites; with inheritance, the language now truly supports object-oriented programming; Windows Forms natively supports accessibility and visual inheritance; and deploying your applications is now as simple as copying your executables and components from directory to directory.

Visual Basic.NET is now fully integrated with the other Microsoft Visual Studio.NET languages. Not only can you develop application components in different programming languages, your classes can now inherit from classes written in other languages using cross-language inheritance. With the unified debugger, you can now debug multiple language applications, irrespective of whether they are running locally or on remote computers. Finally, whatever language you use, the Microsoft .NET Framework provides a rich set of APIs for Microsoft Windows® and the Internet.

ADO.NET supports the industry standards. ADO.NET, like ADO, provides a data access interface to communicate with OLE DB-compliant data sources, such as Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000. Data-sharing consumer applications can use ADO.NET to connect to these data sources and retrieve, manipulate, and update data. Applications can also use OLE DB to manipulate data kept in non-relational formats, such as Microsoft Excel.

In solutions requiring disconnected or remote access to data, ADO.NET uses XML to exchange data between programs or with Web pages. Any component that can read XML can process ADO.NET components. A receiving component does not even have to be an ADO.NET component if a transmitting ADO.NET component packages and delivers a data set in an XML file. Transmitting information in XML-formatted data sets enables programmers to easily separate the data processing and user interface components of a data-sharing application onto separate servers. This can greatly improve both performance and maintainability for systems supporting many users.

For distributed application, use of XML data sets in ADO.NET provides performance advantages relative to the COM marshalling used to transmit disconnected data sets in ADO. Because transmission of data sets occurs through XML files in a simple text-based standard accepted throughout the industry, receiving components have none of the architectural restrictions required by COM. XML data sets used in ADO.NET also avoid the processing cost of converting values in a record set to data types recognized by COM. Virtually any two components can share XML data sets provided that they both use the same XML schema for formatting the data set.

ADO.NET also supports the scalability required by Web-based data-sharing applications. Web applications must serve tens, hundreds, or even thousands of users. ADO.NET does not retain lengthy database locks or active connections that monopolize limited resources. This allows the number of users to grow with only small increases of the demands on the resources of a system.

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