Difference between ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX

ASP.NET

 is a web development model, which is used to deliver interactive, data-driven Web application over the internet. It also consists of a large number of controls, such as a text boxes, button and labels for assembling , configuring, and manipulating code to create hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) pages. You can create ASP.NET application using any CLR compliant language such as Visual basic, C#, Visual c++ and j#. The main features of ASP.NET are as follows.

Better Performance – When you request a Web page for the first time after compiling ASP.NET code, the CLR complies the code and stores the cached copy of the result. Now, for any subsequent calls to the same pag, the cached copy of the result is retrieved instead of going back to the server.

Improved security –ASP.NET has four different methods of authentication:
1. Forms—Allows the ASP.NET application to use its own custom business logic for authentication.
2. Windows—Checks the identity of user against the Windows user accounts that are stored on the web Server. If the credentials of a user match with that of a Windows user account, then the user is authenticated.

Greater Scalability- The session states in ASP.NET are maintained in a separate process on a different machine or database. This enables cross-server sessions to occurs, solving the problem of Web forms when more web servers need to be added as the traffic grows.

Cookie-less Sessions—ASP.NET stores the session state even when the cookies in a Web Browser are disabled. In such a case, the session ID is passed as a part of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Ajax,

 formerly code named as Atlas, is an extension of ASP.NET for developing and implementing AJAX functionality. ASP.NET AJAX Includes both client-side and server-side components that allow the developers to create Web application that are capable to update the data on a website without a complete reload of the page

The following are the advantages of using AJAX:
Asynchronous – Enable asynchronous calls to the web server without making the users wait for the data.

The minimal transfer of the data –Helps in sending only a part of the modified data to the web server minimizing the network traffic and performing the operations quicker. This feature is useful in sites where restricted pipes are allowed for data transfer resulting in improved network performance.

Minimal processing on the web server – Minimizes the processing on the web server as only the necessary data needs to be sent. Now, the server is not required to send a full page back to the server.