Understanding the Project Type

ASP.NET Web Forms lets you build dynamic websites using a familiar drag-and-drop, event-driven model. A design surface and hundreds of controls and components let you rapidly build sophisticated, powerful UI-driven sites with data access. The Wingtip Toy Store is based on ASP.NET Web Forms, but many of the concepts you learn in this tutorial series are applicable to all of ASP.NET.

ASP.NET offers three development frameworks:

ASP.NET Web Forms

The Web Forms framework targets developers who prefer declarative and control-based programming, such as Microsoft Windows Forms (WinForms) and WPF/XAML/Silverlight. It offers a WYSIWYG designer-driven development model, so it's popular with developers looking for a rapid application development (RAD) environment for web development. If you’re new to web programming and are familiar with the traditional Microsoft RAD client development tools (for example, for Visual Basic and Visual C#), you can quickly build a web application without having experience in HTML and JavaScript.

ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC targets developers who are interested in patterns and principles like test-driven development, separation of concerns, inversion of control (IoC), and dependency injection (DI). This framework encourages separating the business logic layer of a web application from its presentation layer.

ASP.NET Web Pages

ASP.NET Web Pages targets developers who want a simple web development story, along the lines of PHP. In the Web Pages model, you create HTML pages and then add server-based code to the page in order to dynamically control how that markup is rendered. Web Pages is specifically designed to be a lightweight framework, and it's the easiest entry point into ASP.NET for people who know HTML but might not have broad programming experience — for example, students or hobbyists. It's also a good way for web developers who know PHP or similar frameworks to start using ASP.NET.