ASP.net a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services. In essence this means that developers can now easily harness the power of databases and rich media via especially written classes.

 Still don’t understand?

Well to be honest if you are not a developer you don’t really need to understand how it works but need to appreciate the functionality that ASP.net can bring to your website. ASP.net allows you to create not just websites but whole on-line applications that provide dynamic content to your customers.

So what is an on-line web application? This differs from a static website is that your users can decide what content they want to view. An example of a web application would be an on-line email tool or a financial calculator. You can also build security and role based policies so that only people you know about can access your application. This is typically achieved via a registration process allowing users to authenticate to website gaining them access to advanced tools and functionality.

ASP.net allows you to access databases of information and present them in web page form. This might be products and stock levels for an eCommerce website or financial modelling tools like MS Excel. The ability to take information from differing sources and present them in a secured way is extremely powerful and from a business point of view, allows you to automate almost every aspect of your IT production train.

If we take an ASP.net enabled eCommerce website for example, we can see that ASP.net can handle the membership of users, assign them to roles and apply security against those roles. ASP.net can attach to your products database and present products to the website that are available and in stock. It can also calculate delivery costs based on varying metrics such as product weight and client postcode. It can also handle coupons and special offers, write to your financial journals and send a picking request to your warehouse.

So ASP.net is powerful and flexible but can it look good?