So, it was in early 1996 that Denali (the codename for ASP) was released as a beta version 0.9 product, and it took the Web-development world by storm. The ability to execute code inline within a Web page was so simple and yet so powerful. With the provision of a series of components that could perform advanced features, most notably ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), it was almost child's play to create all kinds of dynamic pages.

The final release version of Active Server Pages 1.0, available as an add-on for IIS 3.0, was soon in use on Windows platforms all over the place. The combination of ASP with ADO enabled developers to easily create and open recordsets from a database. There's no doubt that this was one of the main factors for its rapid acceptance, because now you could create and open recordsets from a database within the script, and manipulate and output any values, in any order, almost any way you wanted.

In 1998, Microsoft introduced ASP 2.0 as part of the free Windows NT4 Option Pack. The major difference between this release of ASP and version 1.0 was in the way that external components could be instantiated. With ASP 2.0 and IIS 4.0, it is possible to create an ASP application, and within it run components in their own separate memory space (i.e. out of process). The provision of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) also made it easy to build components that can partake in transactions.