ASP.net was developed by Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie after the release of Internet Information Services 4.0 in 1997. It’s initial prototype was called “XSP” and was created by using Java. Earlier lots of features like garbage collection etc. were not provided by Microsoft. As “XSP” was built on the top of Common Language Runtime (CLR), it provided lots of features which were proposed but not yet implemented by Microsoft. It offered an object-oriented programming environment.
XSP was re-implemented with the intention to provide as an easy migration path for ASP developers using C# and renamed as “ASP+”. Now ASP+ was used in conjunction with COBOL and support for a variety of other languages like Visual Basic.NET, C#, Python, Perl etc.
After four years of development, ASP.net 1.0 was released on January 5, 2002 with lots of features like Code behind Model, interactive user controls, better user authentication with accounts and roles, rendering technique, state management etc. With ASP.net, the gap between writing Windows-based applications and Web-based applications has been closed.