An Active Server Page (ASP) is an HTML page that includes one or more scripts (small embedded programs) that are interpreted by a script interpreter (such as VBScript or JScript) and that are processed on a Microsoft Web server before the page is sent to the user. An ASP involves programs that run on a server, usually tailoring a page for the user. The script in the Web page at the server uses input received as the result of the user's request for the page to access data from a database and then builds or customizes the page on the fly before sending it to the requestor.
ASP.NET (also called ASP+) is the next generation of Microsoft Active Server Page (ASP). Both ASP and ASP.NET allow a Web site builder to dynamically build Web pages on the fly by inserting queries to a relational database in the Web page. ASP.NET is different than its predecessor in two major ways:
ASP.NET files have a .ASPX extension. In an OOM, an ASP.NET is represented as a file object and is linked to a component (of type ASP.NET). The component type Active Server Page (ASP.NET) allows you to identify this component. Components of this type are linked to a single file object that defines the page.
When you set the type of the component to ASP.NET, the appropriate ASP.NET file object is automatically created, or attached if it already exists. You can see the ASP.NET file object from the Files tab in the component property sheet.