The biggest challenges facing the Web developer today must be the continued issues of browser compatibility, and the increasing complexity of the pages that they have to create. Trying to build more interactive pages that use the latest features of each browser, whilst still making sure that the pages will work on all the popular browsers, is a nightmare that refuses to go away.

And, of course, it will only get worse with the new types of Internet device that are on the way, or here already. In particular, trying to build pages to offer the same user-level capability to cellular phones as to traditional browser clients is just about impossible. The text-only 12-character by 3-line display of many cellular phones does tend to limit creativity and user interaction.

One obvious solution is to create output that is targeted at each specific client dynamically – or create multiple versions of the same site, one for each type of client. The second option is not attractive, and most developers would prefer the first one. However, this implies that every hit from every user will require some server-side processing to figure out what output to create.

If this is the case, why not automate much of the process? To this end, ASP+ introduces the concept of server controls that encapsulate common tasks and provide a clean programming model. They also help to manage the targeting of all the different types of client.