Microsoft ASP.NET Help Pages

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ASP (Active Server Pages)
ASP is an HTML page that includes one or more scripts (small embedded programs) that are processed on a Microsoft web server before the page is sent to the user.

ASP.NET (newest since 2014)
ASP.NET is part of Microsoft’s .NET platform and is the successor to ASP technology. ASP.NET is a free web framework for building web sites and web applications using HTML5, CSS3, & JavaScript. Typical ASP.NET Downloads include the following software:

  • Visual Studio Community 2015,
  • ASP.NET and Web Tools 2015 for Visual Studio,
  • Hive ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) Drive 32 & 64 bits,
  • Azure SDK (Software Development Kit), and
  • Azure Cloud Tools add-ons for Visual Studio Community 2015.

Visual Studio Express for Web (till 2013)
To create ASP.NET web applications, you can use Visual Studio. Visual Studio Express for Web, a free standalone product, is part of the Visual Studio family. It is a development environment for building, testing, and deploying web standard applications using (i) ASP.NET, (ii) Internet Information Services (IIS), (iii) SQL Server, and (iv) Windows Azure. It develops, debugs, and deploys using the latest standards (HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) and all of the ASP.NET framework.

Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express (till 2012)
VWD is one of ASP.NET development tools. Visual Web Developer Express is a free Visual Studio web development environment for building and testing next generation standards-based web applications and services.

Visual Studio
Visual Studio is a development environment from Microsoft for creating web applications, as well as client (Windows) applications, Windows services, components, controls, and other types of applications.