ASP.NET Versions

Updated March 28, 2023

Introduction to ASP.NET Versions

ASP.NET versions are the different releases of the ASP.NET framework shipped over the years starting from 2002 till date, the framework has improved considerably from its first ASP.NET version consisting of different and very exciting features introduced over time, which made the design and development of web applications easier and faster and with the different versions it improved its website security implementing different protocols for data encryption.

Top 13 ASP.NET Versions

.NET comprises of various versions, following are the top 13 ASP.NET Versions as given below.

1) NET 1.0

This is the very first version of ASP.NET introduced in 2002. The 1^st version was introduced along with Visual Studio.net. It was based on object-oriented programming and supported inheritance, polymorphism and others, type safety and DLL Class Libraries. These class libraries helped in building more robust web applications with more features than simple HTML rendering.

2) NET 1.1

The second version was introduced in 2003. This release was primarily targeted for support for ODBC and database. This feature was used by mobile application developers for better web rendering. Another feature introduced with this release was automatic input validation. One of the main features of the ASP.NET framework is the security it provides. Any site in ASP.NET as security aspects as Authentication, Authorization, Confidentiality, and Integrity. With the use of authentication that is the process of checking if the user can access the web page while authorization is the process of defining which parts of the web page, the user can access. This authentication in ASP.NET can be done in four ways and Custom Authentication.

3) NET 2.0

The third release introduced in 2005 was a significant development in previous versions with many new features. In ASP.NET 2005, there can be different data controls like Grid View, Form View, and Details View plus navigation controls. This release also introduced Master Pages, Themes, skins, web parts and many more. It also supported 64-bit processors and full pre-compilation.

4) NET 3.0

The ASP.NET 3.0 was released in the year 2006, with very important features as the Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation using which ASP.NET websites can be hosted and Windows CardSpace, this uses APS.NET for login roles.

5) NET 3.5

The 3.5 version was released with Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Server 2008. This version came with support for LINQ and inbuilt ASP.NET AJAX. It also included more intuitive data controls such as ListView, Data Pager, etc. This version was used many to improve the user experience.

6) NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

The Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 included this release. The significant feature included support for maintaining browser history in a web site developed using ASP.NET AJAX application. Also, it included a feature of combining multiple JavaScript files into one for the sake of easier download.

7) NET 4.0

Introduced in 2010, it includes features like Meta Data and Meta Description added in the Page Class of the aspx page, which helps in improving the search of your web site on the internet making it SEO friendly. This version also introduced the parallel extensions to support parallel computing used in multi-core distributed systems.

8) NET 4.5

The ASP.NET 4.5 version was shipped with Visual Studio 2012 version. It has some very exciting versions making the developed websites more scalable and faster with innovative data controls and easy to use validations.

9) NET 4.5.1

Introduced in 2013 with Visual Studio 2013 and had features like Entity Framework version 6, SignalR, OWIN and Bootstrap 3.0. SignalR is a communication network build for bidirectional message flow from server to the client while OWIN is the Open Web Interface for the .NET. Previously the ASP.NET was built over top of IIS which caused difficulties in running over other web servers. OWIN creates a standard interface between .NET web applications and other web servers.

10) NET 4.6

Added with the Visual Studio 2015 it has entity framework version 7. This version provides HTTP/2 support when running on Windows 10. It also provides API with async calls making it thread-safe. HTTP/2 is a major change release over the standard HTTP protocol used in the World Wide Web. The changes in web apis also make this release more exciting and are used until now by the developers. The CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture properties of the Thread class can be read and write as well.

11) NET 4.7

Shipped in the year 2017, it provides support for TLS protocols, it also included windows 10 update. The TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols primarily provide privacy and data integrity between the communicating parties. Many applications such as Web Browsing, Instant Messaging, Voice Over IP use the TLS protocol service.

12) NET 4.7.1

This version was shipped with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The main feature of this release was the support for the SHA -2 (Secure Hash Algorithm). With support for TLS in version 4.7 and SHA-2 in version 4.8, the web applications now become more secure as they use cryptographic Hash Functions in data encryption.

13) NET 4.8

The 4.8 version of the ASP.NET is the latest version of the framework released in 2019. This version included improvements over JIT and NGEN compilers. This release provides enhancements for WCF services, also significant improvements over the Web Forms and Automation improvements for WPF. This version provides support for updates in the Zlib, a data compression library. ASP.NET 4.8 provides inbuilt functions for compression and decompression of the files.

Models of ASP.NET Versions

Some of the models supported by ASP.NET are:

• NET Web Forms: This is a framework for building modular web pages, UI for these pages is processed at the server-side.
• NET MVC: Helps in building web pages using a model – view – controller design pattern.
• NET Web Pages: This is the framework that adds dynamic code and data access logic directly inside the HTML tags.
• NET Web API: Introduced to build web API using the .NET framework.

Conclusion

To summarize, ASP.NET is a server-side web application framework designed to create dynamic web pages. A successor to ASP.net knows as ASP.NET Core was introduced in 2016 which a re-implementation as a modular framework. The ASP.NET itself supports different modals to help programmers build robust and user-friendly web applications.

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