What is Report Sharp-Shooter?
ASP .NET was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. The ASP.NET SOAP extension framework allows ASP.NET components to process SOAP messages.
State management
ASP.NET applications are hosted by a web server and are accessed using the stateless HTTP protocol. As such, if an application uses stateful interaction, it has to implement state management on its own. ASP.NET provides various functions for state management. Conceptually, Microsoft treats "state" as GUI state; problems may arise if an application needs to keep track of "data state", for example, a finite state machine which may be in a transient state between requests (lazy evaluation) or which takes a long time to initialize.
Session state
Server-side session state is held by a collection of user-defined session variables, which are persisted during a user session. These variables, accessed using the Session collection, are unique to each session instance. The variables can be set to be automatically destroyed after a defined time of inactivity, even if the session does not end. Client-side user session is maintained by either a cookie or by encoding the session ID in the URL itself.
Performance
ASP.NET aims for performance benefits over other script-based technologies (including Classic ASP) by compiling the server-side code to one or more DLL files on the web server. This compilation happens automatically the first time a page is requested (which means the developer need not perform a separate compilation step for pages). This feature provides the ease of development offered by scripting languages with the performance benefits of a compiled binary. However, the compilation might cause a noticeable but short delay to the web user when the newly-edited page is first requested from the web server, but won't again unless the page requested is updated further.
The ASPX and other resource files are placed in a virtual host on an Internet Information Services server (or other compatible ASP.NET servers; see Other Implementations, below). The first time a client requests a page, the .NET framework parses and compiles the file(s) into a .NET assembly and sends the response; subsequent requests are served from the DLL files. By default ASP.NET will compile the entire site in batches of 1000 files upon first request. If the compilation delay is causing problems, the batch size or the compilation strategy may be tweaked.
Developers can also choose to pre-compile their "codebehind" files before deployment, using MS Visual Studio, eliminating the need for just-in-time compilation in a production environment. This also eliminates the need of having the source code on the web server.