Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET. Pt. 1. | 2

Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET. Pt. 1.

The Book’s Website

Located at http://www.sitepoint.com/books/aspnet1/, the Website that supports this book will give you access to the following facilities:

As you progress through this book, you’ll note a number of references to the code archive. This is a downloadable ZIP archive that contains complete code for all the examples presented in the book.

The archive contains one folder for each chapter of the book. Each of these folders in turn contains CS and VB subfolders, which contain the C# and VB.NET versions of all the examples for that chapter, respectively. In later chapters, these files are further divided into two more subfolders: Lessons for standalone examples presented for a single chapter, and Project for files associated with the Dorknozzle Intranet Application, a larger-scale project that we’ll work on throughout the book, which I’ll introduce in Chapter 4, Web Forms and Web Controls.

No book is perfect, and we expect that watchful readers will be able to spot at least one or two mistakes before the end of this one. The Errata page on the book’s Website will always have the latest information about known typographical and code errors, and necessary updates for new releases of ASP.NET and the various Web standards that apply.

The SitePoint Forums

If you’d like to communicate with me or anyone else on the SitePoint publishing team about this book, you should join SitePoint’s online community. The .NET forum in particular can offer an abundance of information above and beyond the solutions in this book.

In fact, you should join that community even if you don’t want to talk to us, because there are a lot of fun and experienced Web designers and developers hanging out there. It’s a good way to learn new stuff, get questions answered in a hurry, and just have fun.

If you can’t find your answer through the forums, or if you wish to contact us for any other reason, the best place to write is . We have a well-manned email support system set up to track your inquiries, and if our support staff members are unable to answer your question, they will send it straight to me. Suggestions for improvements as well as notices of any mistakes you may find are especially welcome.

It’s being touted as the “next big thing.” Microsoft has invested millions in marketing, advertising, and development to produce what it feels is the foundation of the future Internet. It’s a corporate initiative, the strategy of which was deemed so important, that Bill Gates himself, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, decided to oversee personally its development. It is a technology that Microsoft claims will reinvent the way companies carry out business globally for years to come. In his opening speech at the Professional Developers’ Conference (PDC) held in Orlando Florida in July of 2000, Gates stated that a transition of this magnitude only comes around once every five to six years. What is this show-stopping technology? It’s .NET.

.NET is the result of a complete make-over of Microsoft’s software development products, and forms part of the company’s new strategy for delivering software as a service. The key features that .NET offers include:

The book focuses on one of the core components within the .NET Framework: ASP.NET.

For years now, Active Server Pages (ASP) has been arguably the leading choice for Web developers building dynamic Websites on Windows Web servers. ASP has gained popularity by offering the simplicity of flexible scripting via several languages. That, combined with the fact that it’s built into every Microsoft Windows-based Web server, has made ASP a difficult act to follow.

Early in 2002, Microsoft released its new technology for Internet development. Originally called ASP+, it was finally released as ASP.NET, and represents a leap forward from ASP both in sophistication and productivity for the developer. It continues to offer flexibility in terms of the languages it supports, but instead of a range of simple scripting languages, developers can now choose between several fully-fledged programming languages. Development in ASP.NET requires not only an understanding of HTML and Web design, but also a firm grasp of the concepts of object-oriented programming and development.

In the next few sections, I’ll introduce you to the basics of ASP.NET. I’ll walk you through installing it on your Web server, and take you through a simple dynamic example that demonstrates how ASP.NET pages are constructed. First, let’s define what ASP.NET actually is.

ASP.NET is a server-side technology for developing Web applications based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Let’s break that jargon-filled sentence down.

ASP.NET is server-side; that is, it runs on the Web server. Most Web designers start by learning client-side technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). When a Web browser requests a Web page created with client-side technologies, the Web server simply grabs the files that the browser (the client) requests and sends them down the line. The client is entirely responsible for reading the code in the files and interpreting it to display the page on the screen. Server-side technologies, like ASP.NET, are different. Instead of being interpreted by the client, server-side code (for example, the code in an ASP.NET page) is interpreted by the Web server. In the case of ASP.NET, the code in the page is read by the server and used dynamically to generate standard HTML/JavaScript/CSS that is then sent to the browser. As all processing of ASP.NET code occurs on the server, it’s called a server-side technology. As Figure 1.1 shows, the user (client) only sees the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS within the browser. The server (and server-side technology) is entirely responsible for processing the dynamic portions of the page.

Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: June 18, 2004

URL: http://webreference.com/programming/asp_net/1