The ASP Timeline

Before looking at , let’s briefly take a look at the short but eventful history of Active Server Pages to see how we got to where we are today: | 10 Chapter 1 Introducing The ASP Timeline Before looking at let s briefly take a look at the short but eventful history of Active Server Pages to see how we got to where we are today December 1995 Microsoft makes a dramatic U-turn and announces that their whole product lineup will be refocused to embrace the Internet. Up until this point they had largely ignored the Internet market and had fallen dangerously behind the competition. February 1996 Microsoft releases Internet Information Server to the public for free download. Microsoft spokespeople claim that the server offers a four-fold increase in performance over Netscape Netsite server. IIS includes ISAPI and IDC technologies. With the release ofWindows NT 4 IIS version 2 is bundled while IIS 1 is available for Windows NT . October 1996 Microsoft releases the public beta for IIS 3 as an optional upgrade to IIS major change with this version is the inclusion of a new development environment called Active Server Pages formerly known under its project name of Denali. As part of their public relations campaign Microsoft claims they are beating Netscape 21 in the server market. IIS no longer supports MIPS and NT . August 1997 Microsoft releases ASP 2 with IIS 4. IIS now includes the Microsoft Management Console MMC to make administering the server more straightforward and the SMTP server is now bundled having previously been a part of the Commercial package. IIS and ASP are now tightly integrated with Microsoft Transaction Server and this is seen as a real step forward in making the platform a credible choice for large-scale deployment. 1998-2000 Microsoft started releasing incremental versions of the language Scripting Engines adding language features and functionality without the need for full ASP version updates such as the addition of Regular Expressions for VBScript programmers. With the release ofWindows 2000 with IIS 5 Active Server Pages 3 became available. ASP 3 allowed for .