HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
As you can see, ASP.NET is part of the overall .NET Framework and relies heavily on .NET Framework
base class libraries. On the top of the .NET Framework, ASP.NET provides features and services that are
specific to web applications. These features and services include authentication, authorization,
membership, role management, and profile management, all of which can be consumed in ASP.NET web
sites and services. The two prominent ways of building ASP.NET web sites are Web Forms and MVC
applications. To develop services, you can use ASMX web services (available since version 1.0 of ASP.NET)
or other better options such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and the Web API.
Figure 1-9 shows that Web Forms and MVC views are going to use of HTML5. At first glance, you may
think the use of HTML5 is restricted to the display part of an ASP.NET application. Although the user
interface is where you use HTML5 heavily, the integration goes deeper. Figure 1-10 shows the integration
between HTML5 and ASP.NET.
Figure 1-10.
HTML5 and ASP.NET interaction
The ASP.NET server-side infrastructure sends HTML5 markup to the browser when a request is
received. The ASP.NET server-side infrastructure consists of code in a web form code file or MVC
controller. Most real-world web applications use data residing in a data store such as SQL Server. To access
this business data, you can use a combination of ADO.NET and Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) or Entity
Framework.
When the ASP.NET server-side infrastructure sends HTML5 markup to the client browser, the browser
renders the user interface and allows the end user to work with the page. Many HTML5 features
mentioned earlier expose programmable APIs that can be consumed using JavaScript code. The JavaScript
code can, in turn, talk with the server to retrieve data or configuration needed for processing. For example,
suppose you let the end user plot a simple bar graph in the browser using the HTML5 canvas API. After the
graph is finished, you may want the user to save its data and related information to a database. This
requires transfer of data from the client browser to the server. To facilitate this data transfer, you can use
jQuery and send an Ajax request to a piece of server-side code. The server-side code then saves the data
into a database.
Some features of HTML5 may not need any server-side interaction once the page is rendered. For
example, you can display an HTML
<form>
that uses the new
<input>
types such as
Email
and
URL
. Doing so
doesn't require any talk-back with the server.
