ASP.NET Web Forms

The ASP.NET Web Forms page framework is a scalable common language runtime programming model that can be used on the server to dynamically generate Web pages.
Intended as a logical evolution of ASP (ASP.NET provides syntax compatibility with existing pages), the ASP.NET Web Forms framework has been specifically designed to address a number of key deficiencies in the previous model. In particular, it provides:

The ability to create and use reusable UI controls that can encapsulate common functionality and thus reduce the amount of code that a page developer has to write.

The ability for developers to cleanly structure their page logic in an orderly fashion (not "spaghetti code").

The ability for development tools to provide strong WYSIWYG design support for pages (existing ASP code is opaque to tools).

ASP.NET Web Forms pages are text files with an .aspx file name extension. They can be deployed throughout an IIS virtual root directory tree. When a browser client requests .aspx resources, the ASP.NET runtime parses and compiles the target file into a .NET Framework class. This class can then be used to dynamically process incoming requests. (Note that the .aspx file is compiled only the first time it is accessed; the compiled type instance is then reused across multiple requests).
An ASP.NET page can be created simply by taking an existing HTML file and changing its file name extension to .aspx (no modification of code is required). For example, the following sample demonstrates a simple HTML page that collects a user's name and category preference and then performs a form postback to the originating page when a button is clicked:

ASP.NET provides syntax compatibility with existing ASP pages. This includes support for <% %> code render blocks that can be intermixed with HTML content within an .aspx file. These code blocks execute in a top-down manner at page render time.

ASP.NET page developers can utilize code blocks to dynamically modify HTML output much as they can today with ASP. For example, the following sample demonstrates how code blocks can be used to interpret results posted back from a client.

While code blocks provide a powerful way to custom manipulate the text output returned from an ASP.NET page, they do not provide a clean HTML programming model. As the sample above illustrates, developers using only code blocks must custom manage page state between round trips and custom interpret posted values.