Microsoft ® Windows Server 2003 takes the best of Windows Server 2000 technology while greatly improving security, dependability and scalability to become the fastest and most reliable Windows server operating system ever offered by Microsoft ® . All existing Windows-based applications running on a Windows 2000 Web hosting platform can run on Windows Server 2003. You don't have to migrate your existing ASP applications to start using ASP.NET. ASP pages and ASP.NET pages can run side-by-side on Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. Your existing ASP applications continue to be processed by ASP.DLL, while new ASP.NET pages are processed by the new ASP.NET engine. The ASP.NET engine even lets you continue to use your existing classic COM components.

Helpful Links:

- Microsoft® Windows Server 2003 Home
- Microsoft® Windows Server 2003 News Reviews
- Microsoft® ASP.NET Home
- Microsoft® ASP.NET Development Tools
- Microsoft® ASP.NET Tutorials

ASP.NET server controls enable an HTML-like style of programming that lets you build great pages with far less code than with classic ASP. Best of all, ASP.NET pages work in all browsers including Netscape, Opera, AOL, and Internet Explorer. ASP.NET lets you leverage your current programming language skills. Unlike classic ASP, which supports only interpreted VBScript and JScript, ASP.NET now supports multiple .NET languages (including built-in support for VB.NET, C#, and JScript.NET - no tool required), giving you unprecedented flexibility in your choice of language.

Helpful Links:

- Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET 2003 Home
- Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET 2003 News & Reviews

Application features that used to be hard to implement, or required a 3rd-party component, can now be added in just a few lines of code using the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework offers over 4500 classes that encapsulate rich functionality like XML, data access, file upload, regular expressions, image generation, performance monitoring and logging, transactions, message queuing, SMTP mail, and much more! .NET Framework also provides a platform for rapidly developing and deploying XML Web services. XML Web services allow you to share data and functionality over a network through standard, platform-independent protocols like XML, SOAP, and HTTP.

Helpful Links:

- Microsoft® .NET Framework Home
- Microsoft® .NET Framework News & Reviews

The new and improved IIS 6.0 allows us to host our customer's Web applications in isolated application pools resulting in increased security and reliability. Individual Web applications are assignable to single or shared application pools with unique settings supporting different levels of service requirements. Individual security settings for different isolated application pools prevent access problems from affecting overall Web server availability and other Web applications in a shared Web hosting environment.