ASP.NET Compilation Models

ASP.NET Compilation

In the previous chapter, I covered the basics of ASP.NET code models. In this chapter, we'll discuss the details of how ASP.NET applications are compiled. This information is not vital to your success as an ASP.NET developer, but having an understanding of the architecture of your development environment always makes you a better developer.

ASP.NET is nothing like the legacy ASP with which many developers are familiar. You develop ASP pages by using VBScript or JScript, and they are interpreted, meaning that they are executed just as they are written, directly from the page. ASP.NET is entirely different in that ASP.NET pages are compiled before they are executed.

When you write ASP.NET code, you do so in human-readable text. Before ASP.NET can run your code, it has to convert it into something that the computer can understand and execute. The process of converting code from what a programmer types into what a computer can actually execute is called compilation.

Exactly how compilation takes place in ASP.NET depends on the compilation model that you use. Several different compilation models are available to you in ASP.NET 3.5.

The Web Application Compilation Model

The web application compilation model is the same model provided in ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1. When you use this model, you use the Build menu in Visual Web Developer to compile your application into a single DLL file that is copied to a bin folder in the root of your application. When the first request comes into your application, the DLL from the bin folder is copied to the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder, where it is then recompiled into code that the operating system can execute in a process known as just-in-time (JIT) compilation. The JIT compilation causes a delay of several seconds on the first request of the application.

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