What Are ASP Files? How to View Their Content

What Are Active Server Pages (ASP)?

ASP is a file extension which stands for Active Server Pages. An Active Server Page is a Web page where the scripts are processed by the Web server not by the client browser. The client browser only gets the results processed by the domain server outputted to his screen in HTML syntax. ASP, as it is more commonly known, is a technology that enables you to make dynamic and interactive web pages.

The default scripting language used for writing ASP is VBScript, although you can use other scripting languages like JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript) or install other non-native scripting engines on the server, like C#. In the beginning of every asp page you have to declare what language you are going to use to script the server-side code of your active server page.

ASP pages have the extension .asp instead of .htm, when a page with the extension .asp is requested by a browser the web server knows to interpret any ASP contained within the web page before sending the HTML produced to the browser.

As ASP was first introduced by Microsoft on its web server, Internet Information Services (IIS), that runs on Windows 2000 and all the later versions, it is this web server that ASP pages usually run best on because both were developed by the same company in order to complement and support each other as a complete web hosting/development and maintenance solution.

Other web servers which can interpret ASP pages include Apache, I-Planet, Zeus, Red Hat Secure Server, and more, however you need to install a product called Chili!Soft ASP produced by Sun which enables ASP to be used on them using various operating systems including, Linux, Solaris, and more.

Here is a list of file extensions which are configured by default to be handled by ASP.NET 2.0. 

• .asax used for application level logic global.asax
• .ascx used for creating web user control.
• .ashx used to create a custom httphandler
• .asmx used to create web services
• .aspx used for web application pages
• .axd is used for special webresource axd handler which allows the developer to package component and controls along with javascript, images etc..in a single assembly. The extension is also used for trace output.
• .browser are the browser capabilities files stored in XML format. These gfiles are used to define the capabilities of the browser.
• .config used to store the configuration of the web application. web.config and machine.config are the common examples
• .cs used as the code behind when the language chosen is C# (CSharp)
• .vb used as the code behind when the language chosen is Visual Basic.Net
• .master used as the extension for the master page.
• .resx used as an extension for the resource file of the page for internationalization and localization purpose.
• .sitemap is used as the configuration file for sitemap
• .skin used as the skin file for the themes
• .svc used to define a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) based service.

For more information on where you can find a list of thousands of other file extensions including file extension asp go to the link provided, otherwise you can also visit this authoritative web resource which sets standards for the internet: W3Cschools has plenty of information about ASP files.

By Jon Buchanon