Introduction

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is a comprehensive Web Server software package that allows you to publish information on your Intranet, or on the World Wide Web. IIS is included with Professional and Server versions of all recent Windows operating systems; all you need add is a network connection to run your own Web site.

IIS includes Active Server Page (ASP) technology. The basic idea of ASP is to permit web pages to be created dynamically by the web server. An ASP file is a character file that contains a mixture of HTML and scripts. When IIS receives a request for an ASP file, it executes the server-side scripts contained in the file to build the Web page that is to be sent to the browser. In addition to server-side scripts, ASP files can contain HTML (including related client-side scripts) as well as calls to components that can perform a variety of tasks such as database lookup, calculations, and business logic.

Basically, each script inside an ASP page generates a stream of HTML. The server runs the scripts and assembles the resulting HTML into a single stream (Web page) that is sent to the browser.

ASP.NET is a new version of ASP and is based upon the Microsoft .NET Framework technology. It offers significantly better performance and a host of new features including support for Web Services.