The Versions of ASP
So, it was in early 1996 that Denali (the codename
for ASP) was released as a beta version 0.9 product, and it took the Web-development
world by storm. The ability to execute code inline within a Web page was so
simple and yet so powerful. With the provision of a series of components that
could perform advanced features, most notably ActiveX
Data Objects (ADO), it was almost child's play to create all kinds
of dynamic pages.
The final release version of Active Server Pages 1.0, available as an add-on
for IIS 3.0, was soon in use on Windows platforms all over the place. The combination
of ASP with ADO enabled developers to easily create and open recordsets from
a database. There's no doubt that this was one of the main factors for its rapid
acceptance, because now you could create and open recordsets from a database
within the script, and manipulate and output any values, in any order, almost
any way you wanted.
In 1998, Microsoft introduced ASP 2.0 as part of the free Windows
NT4 Option Pack. The major difference between this release of
ASP and version 1.0 was in the way that external components could be instantiated.
With ASP 2.0 and IIS 4.0, it is possible to create an ASP application,
and within it run components in their own separate memory space (i.e. out of
process). The provision of Microsoft Transaction Server
(MTS) also made it easy to build components that can partake in transactions.