I worked with ASP and ASP.NET about 20 years ago, so I was surprised to recently find a polished, modern-looking webshop with .aspx pages in its URLs. I thought Microsoft had abandoned that technology years ago. Is ASP.NET WebForms still supported, and is it still commonly used in real-world applications?
4 Answers
The .aspx extension usually means ASP.NET Web Forms, which is different from modern ASP.NET Core. Web Forms is no longer receiving meaningful new development, but it remains part of the full .NET Framework and is still supported for security and maintenance. A lot of enterprise sites built years ago are still running it, sometimes with a newer visual design layered on top.
Classic ASP from before .NET is a separate, much older technology. ASP.NET Web Forms came later and was commonly used with C# or Visual Basic. Both can still be encountered in long-lived systems, but for a new project most developers would choose ASP.NET Core rather than either legacy platform.
You may see .aspx more often once you start looking for it. Many established business systems and internal applications still use it because replacing a working system is expensive and risky. The extension can also be hidden, so a site may still be using newer ASP.NET technologies without showing it in the URL.
Yes, it is still around. .NET Framework 4.8 remains supported, so existing Web Forms applications can continue operating safely with the appropriate updates. That doesn't make Web Forms a modern choice for new projects, though—new applications generally use ASP.NET Core, which can run on Windows or Linux and uses newer approaches.
Modern ASP.NET applications commonly use Razor views with .cshtml, or other patterns where the file extension isn't exposed at all. So .aspx is a fairly strong hint that the site is using older Web Forms, but the absence of it doesn't tell you much.