Microsoft ASP.NET Builds Momentum With Web Development Community

REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 25, 2004 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of additional tools and resources for developers building Web applications. The Microsoft® ASP.NET Resource Kit provides a wealth of resources that include tools, tutorials and samples to help new developers learn ASP.NET. For developers who currently use ASP.NET or other existing Web technologies, the Resource Kit provides new controls and components, discounts on ASP.NET training, and great deals on ASP.NET Web hosting. The ASP.NET Migration Center on MSDN®
includes the newly released ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides, which will help developers by providing documentation, samples and utilities to help them use existing technology investments while upgrading to ASP.NET.

“We’re very excited to see the growing excitement for ASP.NET. The free tools and resources provided with the ASP.NET Resource Kit and ASP.NET Migration Guides will make it even easier for developers to get started with ASP.NET while leveraging their existing skills and investments,” said Scott Guthrie, product unit manager for ASP.NET at Microsoft. “It’s great to see developers in enterprises of all sizes all over the world benefit from the increased productivity, reliability and performance of ASP.NET.”

ASP.NET Resource Kit: Enabling Opportunity for Developers and Partners

The ASP.NET Resource Kit includes the popular ASP.NET Web Matrix, a free tool to build ASP.NET applications, and the ASP.NET Starter Kits, a set of five prebuilt applications complete with source code that are being used by thousands of developers to build their Web sites.

Free online training and discounted classroom training from selected developer-focused Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers (CTECs) are also part of the resource kit. In addition, the Information Management Group Inc. is offering $300 off its ASP.NET Online Training courses, and nine hours of training from Application Developers Training Co. (AppDev) with a retail value of $285 are offered free of charge.

Five leading Web hosters in the United States, Canada and Europe are offering services for $10 a month, which includes Microsoft SQL Server (TM) database support. Verio Inc., myhosting.com, Internet Fr, DiscountASP.NET and Hostbasket are the first of many to offer these valuable resources to customers.

Some market-leading control vendor partners are offering free controls to ASP.NET developers:

  • ComponentOne Studio for ASP.NET offers a comprehensive suite of grid, reporting, charting, data, user-interface and eCommerce ASP.NET (Web Forms) components for enterprise-style Web-based application development.

  • Infragistics WebGrid , part of NetAdvantage 2004, offers an advanced grid with true hierarchical bound and unbound modes, providing a server-side element with a rich-client look in ASP.NET applications.

  • IP*Works! CC ICharge component provides an easy-to-use interface for communicating with major Internet payment aggregators (payment gateways). As a true .NET component, ICharge can be easily integrated into ASP.NET applications and provides a fast and easy solution for businesses that need to accept credit cards.

  • Sax.net Security for ASP.NET enables users to protect their servers from automated programs. A Web page that contains the Sax.net Human Verification Component acts as a virtual gatekeeper that ensures only real people, not automated programs, fill out forms on a site.

  • telerik r.a.d.rotator and r.a.d.spell components include r.a.d.rotator, a multipurpose component for DHTML content rotation and personalization. From stock tickers and news scrollers to product spotlights, weather forecasts, testimonials, running promotions and banner ads, r.a.d.rotator delivers high interactivity and user involvement. telerik r.a.d.spell enables developers to add multilingual spell-checking capabilities to their ASP.NET applications.

Migrating Applications to the Power of ASP.NET

Microsoft also launched the MSDN ASP.NET Migration Center, providing information and tools developers need to move skills and technology investments to the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET. The center includes the previously announced JSP to ASP.NET Migration Guide and the new ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides jointly developed with ArtinSoft. These Migration Guides include free utilities to help migrate ASP code and PHP code to ASP.NET and speed the migration project by automatically converting portions of code. A migration guide, white papers and code samples also are provided to assist in project conversion.

Enterprise Customers Betting Business on ASP.NET

Microsoft recently announced that Match.com LP, a top 25 Web site, has joined a growing list of new customer implementations built on Microsoft technologies that are reaching new heights of business value. Match.com used Visual Studio®
.NET 2003 and ASP.NET running on Windows Server (TM) 2003 to update its transaction-intensive Web site, enabling it to eliminate close to 60 servers, double its Web site performance and maximize developer productivity. ASP.NET has given Match.com the agility and flexibility needed to create a site that facilitates thousands of connections among its users each year.

HSN, an operating business of IAC/InterActive Corp., is the world’s most widely recognized television shopping network. When customers come to HSN.com, it’s often to buy products they’ve seen on a Home Shopping Network television show. To respond to the growing traffic on the Web site, the team at HSN.com implemented the site with ASP.NET, Visual C#®
.NET and SQL Server 2000.

NASDAQ.com is the public Web site of the world’s largest electronic screen-based securities market. Difficult market conditions made it important for NASDAQ.com to reduce costs, without sacrificing the dependable, high-performance user experience that makes the site an asset to the NASDAQ stock market. NASDAQ.com has found that it could meet that challenge, as well as cut costs, increase dependability and improve service to users, by upgrading its Web server infrastructure to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system. Using Microsoft ASP.NET also contributes to the better performance of NASDAQ.com. In addition, being able to write ASP.NET reduces development time.

Availability

The ASP.NET Resource Kit is available for download free of charge from http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/asprk . Developers can also order a copy of the Resource Kit on CD for a small shipping and handling fee.

The MSDN ASP.NET Migration Center and the ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides are located at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/using/migrating/ .

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