Microsoft's release of .Net Framework 2.0 is become big hit in the market. Definitely there is a reason behind this.
There are lots of improvements and cool features made available in the latest version of .Net Framework 2.0 (the latest version of .Net Framework is 3.5) compared to its earlier version 1.x. Few of the cool features such as master pages, themes, profiles, new improved grid view, login controls etc. But one of the nice features, which Microsoft has released with .Net Framework 2.0, is "Asynchronous Pages".
In this topic I am mainly going to talk about this "Asynchronous Pages" in .Net Framework 2.0.
Before I proceed I want to discuss bit about what is "Asynchronous" and "Synchronous" process.
In simple term Synchronous waits for the response whereas Asynchronous does not wait for the response.
For example:
If you are sending a request using synchronous.aspx page for querying a remote database, thread for the request will be alive until and unless remote database send back response back to the requesting page. Since .net framework allows limited thread pool, this can slow down the performance of the application drastically and all other requests to the server will be queued up.
But in case of Asynchronous Pages in .net framework 2.0 thread will return to the thread pool once it sends request to the server and once server sends request back it takes another thread from the pool and finishes request.