Let's say you have create a web page and you want your user to fill out a form.  How are you going to process that form?  Will you want the data to go into a database?  Will you want the data to be passed to another page and manipulated in some way and then represented?  Well, how are you going to do this? Active Server Pages provide a solution - no additional cost.

ASP is Microsoft's tool for data manipulation using a web server.  If you have an NT server with IIS 3 or IIS 4 installed then the ASP engine is already active.  If you have Personal Web Server running on your local machine then you don't have the engine installed by default.  You can get the Microsoft PWS from the Microsoft site.

You can install the ASP engine by placing your FrontPage CD in the drive and then click Start | Find, look for asp.exe then run the file.  I don't know the details for other servers other than the Apache server.  You can install the ASP engine on this server.  You must have the ASP engine installed on your servers - development and production.  This is a server-based process so if you don't have a server running, nothing will happen.