Microsoft ASP.NET was released 15 years ago, in 2002, as part of the then shiny new .NET Framework. It inherited the name ASP (short for Active Server Pages) from its predecessor, with which it barely shared anything else, other than being a technology for developing dynamic server-side content for the internet, which ran on Windows platforms only.
ASP.NET gained tremendous popularity, it has to be said, and competed hand to hand with other popular web frameworks, such as Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) and PHP. In fact, it still does, with sites such as BuiltWith giving it a share of 21% (ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC combined), way ahead of Java (https://trends.builtwith.com/framework). ASP.NET was not just for writing dynamic web pages. It could also be used for XML (SOAP) web services, which, in early 2000, were quite popular. It benefited from the .NET Framework and its big library of classes and reusable components, which made enterprise development almost...
