State is quite an innovative concept in Web development because it eliminates the drawback of losing state data due to reloading of a Web page. By using states in a Web application, you can preserve the state of the application either at the server or client end. The state of a Web application helps you to store the runtime changes that have been made to the Web application. For example, as already described earlier, a change in the data source of the Web application might be initiated by a user when he/she selects and saves some products in the shopping cart.

If you are not using states, these changes are discarded and are not saved. You may think that the whole concept of storing states is optional. However, under certain circumstances, using states with applications is imperative. For example, it is necessary to store states for Web applications, such as an e-commerce shopping site or an Intranet site of a company, to keep track of the requests of the users for the items they have selected on the shopping site or the days requested for vacation on the Intranet site.

Validation controls are responsible to validate the data of an input control. Whenever you provide any input to an application, it performs the validation and displays an error message to user, in case the validation fails.

ASP.NET 4.0 contains the following six types of validation controls:

   => CompareValidator - Performs a comparison between the values contained in two controls.
   => CustomValidator - Writes your own method to perform extra validation.
   => RangeValidator- Checks value according to the range of value.
   => RegularExpressionValidator - Ensures that input is according to the specified pattern or not.
   =>  RequiredFieldValidator - Checks either a control is empty or not.
   => ValidationSummary - Displays a summary of all validation error in a central location.

The code-behind feature of ASP.NET enables you to divide an ASP.NET page into two files - one consisting of the presentation data, and the second, which is also called the code-behind file, consisting of all the business logic. The presentation data contains the interface elements, such as HTML controls and Web server controls, and the code-behind contains the event-handling process to handle the events that are fired by these controls. The file that contains the presentation data has the .aspx extension. The code behind file has either the .cs extension (if you are using the programming language C#) or the .vb (if you are using the programming language Visual Basic .NET) extension.

You can use the System.Net.Mail.MailMessage and the System.Net.Mail.SmtpMail classes to send an email in your Web pages. In order to send an email through your mail server, you need to create an object of the SmtpClient class and set the server name, port, and credentials.

The App_Code folder is automatically present in the project. It stores the files, such as classes, typed data set, text files, and reports. If this folder is not available in the application, you can add this folder. One of the important features of the App_Code folder is that only one dll is created for the complete folder, irrespective of how many files it contains.

The basic difference between ASP and ASP.NET is that ASP is interpreted; whereas, ASP.NET is compiled. This implies that since ASP uses VBScript; therefore, when an ASP page is executed, it is interpreted. On the other hand, ASP.NET uses .NET languages, such as C# and VB.NET, which are compiled to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL).

ASP.NET is a specification developed by Microsoft to create dynamic Web applications, Web sites, and Web services. It is a part of .NET Framework. You can create ASP.NET applications in most of the .NET compatible languages, such as Visual Basic, C#, and J#. The ASP.NET compiles the Web pages and provides much better performance than scripting languages, such as VBScript. The Web Forms support to create powerful forms-based Web pages. You can use ASP.NET Web server controls to create interactive Web applications. With the help of Web server controls, you can easily create a Web application.

DLR is a runtime environment that allows you to integrate dynamic languages with the Common Language Runtime (CLR) by adding a set of services, such as expression trees, call site caching, and dynamic object interoperability to the CLR.

The System.Dynamic and System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespaces are used to hold the classes for DLR. It also provides dynamic features to statically-typed languages, such as C# and Visual Basic to enable their interoperation with dynamic languages.