Active Server Pages

Microsoft® Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting environment that you can use to create interactive Web pages and build powerful Web applications. When the server receives a request for an ASP file, it processes server-side scripts contained in the file to build the Web page that is 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 COM components that perform a variety of tasks, such as connecting to a database or processing business logic.

The topics in this section introduce Active Server Pages, explain the basic concepts of scripting with Active Server Pages, and discuss more complex application issues such as how to maintain state.

This section includes:

• Understanding Active Server Pages: Introduces ASP and describes new features in this release.
• Building ASP Pages: Provides the basic information you need to write a script, and introduces topics ranging from basic syntax to creating transactional scripts.

This section does not include information on:

• More advanced topics, such as designing and building Web applications; see Web Applications: An Overview.
• Reference pages for the components that come with ASP; see Installable Components for ASP.
• Building your own ASP components; see Building Components for ASP.
• Sample scripts; see ASP Samples.