What's New in ASP

Active Server Pages has been enhanced with features that make it easier to use while developing applications.

Microsoft Script Debugger. You can use the Script Debugger to interactively debug .asp files. See Debugging ASP Scripts.
Transactional scripts. ASP pages and the objects used on the page can be run under a transaction context. All work done on that page will either be committed or aborted. Transactions protect your applications from failures that might cause loss of data. See Creating Transactional Scripts.
Administration tool. Many application settings are now available in Internet Service Manager, the administrative tool for Internet Information Server and Personal Web Server (on Windows NT Workstation). See Configuring ASP Applications.
Isolated ASP applications. You can now isolate ASP applications so that they run in a separate memory space from the Web server. This protects your other applications, and the Web server, in case an application fails. It also makes it possible for you to stop an application and unload its components from memory without stopping the Web server. See Isolating Applications.
File upload. Browsers can now upload files to the Web server by using the Posting Acceptor application. You can write ASP scripts to send email with information passed from the Posting Acceptor, such as the location and name of each uploaded file. See the documentation for Posting Accepter (under Microsoft Site Server Express in the table of contents).
New ASP components. ASP provides new base components; see ActiveX Components for an overview.
Application root changes. The root directory of an ASP application can now be a physical directory within your Web site. Previously, the root directory had to be a virtual directory. You can now use Internet Service Manager to indicate the root of an ASP application. See Creating Applications. You must put .asp files in an application tree for the Web server to detect changes to the files and automatically reload them.
Support for Internet Explorer 4.0 channels and Web casting. ASP automatically tells Internet Explorer 4.0 when it is sending a file containing channel definition commands. You can now use ASP to easily generate channel definition (.cdf) files.
Support for HTTP 1.1 protocol. Internet Information Server and Personal Web Server support the HTTP 1.1 protocol. This support enables ASP to take advantage of efficiencies in the new protocol when responding to a browser that supports HTTP 1.1 (such as Internet Explorer 4.0). For example, ASP uses chunked transfer encoding to improve network efficiency when returning pages to a browser.