ASP.NET Web Application Development is a great technology for building large and small web application. The best part of ASP.NET is that you can enhance and customize any of the predefined controls according to your requirements. ASP.NET is a collection of different other technologies for building your ASP.NET Web Application and Web Services. ASP.NET code will be execute on the Windows web server and generate HTML, WML and XML markup languages for the web browsers and handheld devices. With ASP.NET it's easy to build dynamic websites, XML based web services and custom web applications. ASP.NET is based on Common Language Runtime (CLR). It's easy for Web Developers to write their code in any of the technologies such as ASP.NET, Visual Basic .net, Jscript .net which is supported by .NET Framework. It also support Python and Perl open source languages too. In ASP.NET all your server side code is compiled in a .DLL (Dynamic Link Library) file and will be uploaded to the web server.

Advantages of using ASP.NET for your Web Application Development:

• .DLL are precompiled and whenever a client request asp.net pages then it'll display faster on client browsers because .DLL are precompiled and hence there is no compilation time for a web page request.
• Run time error handling is a good feature for redirecting users to any other specified page according the errors.
• User defined controls such as template and menu control
• Class libraries and set of controls reduces the building of asp.net applications.
• ASP.NET has multi-language capabilities allow you to code your web pages in VB.NET, C#, J# etc.
• ASP.NET is able to cache the complete page or just parts of the web page for the performance enhancement.
• ASP.NET Session state can be saved in a dedicated MS-SQL Server database

.NET Framework features:

• Interoperability - In .NET Framework there are several COM libraries, .NET Framework gives the capability for interoperability between custom codes and existing COM libraries.
• Base Class Library - .NET Frame Work Class (FCL) Library or Base Class Library (BCL) is globally available library of types for all languages in .NET Framework.
• Language Independent -.NET Framework defines all datatypes & constructs as supported by Common Language Runtime (CLR) and how they manage interaction with each other datatypes & constructs. This management is know as Common Type System (CTS). Multiple Programming Languages is supported by .NET Framework.
• Common Runtime Engine - There are many coding languages supported by .NET Framework, compiled into an intermediate language commonly known as Common Intermediate Language (CIL). Microsoft's implementation of Common Intermediate Language is known as Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). This MSIL language is compiled as just-in-time compilation (JIT) into native programming code. These process combination concepts known as Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification. Implementation of CLI is universally known as the Common Language Runtime (CLR).
• Security - .NET Framework allows different trust levels (Form Authentication, Windows Authentication & Passport Authentication) for the applications. It's always safe that you should customize your web server for medium trust processing.

These days most of the Web Application Development application are e-commerce ready and they became very popular because everybody wants to save time by ordering their required items and products online. There are few big e-commerce application like Amazon.com, E-bay, Buy.com are very much popular.

The popular software packages for developing ASP.NET applications are:

• SharpDevelop Free Open Source C# and Visual Basic Development tool
• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• ASP.NET Web Matrix Free Application Development Tool for ASP.NET
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 for asp.net application development
• Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 asp.net tool
• Microsoft SharePoint Designer 12 for asp.net web page development
• Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition for ASP.NET 2.0 web design