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For the most part, ASP.NET pages resemble traditional HTML pages, with a few additions. In essence, just using an extension like .aspx on an HTML file will make the .NET Framework process the page. However, before you can work with certain, more advanced features, you will need to know how to use directives.
We’ve already talked a little about directives and what they can do earlier in this chapter. You learned that directives control how a page is created, specify settings when navigating between pages, aid in finding errors, and allow you to import advanced functionality to use within your code. Three of the most commonly used directives are:
Defines page-specific attributes for the ASP.NET page, such as the language used.
Makes functionality defined elsewhere available in a page through the use of namespaces. You will become very familiar with this directive as you progress through this book.
Asyou will see in Chapter 16, Rich Controls and User Controls, you would use this directive to link a user control to the ASP.NET page.
You will become very familiar with these three directives, as they’re the ones that we’ll be using the most in this book. You’ve already seen the Page directive in use. The Import directive imports extra functionality for use within your application logic. The following example, for instance, imports the Mail class, which you could use to send email from a page:
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Web.Mail" %>
The Register directive allows you to register a user control for use on your page. We’ll cover these in Chapter 16, Rich Controls and User Controls, but the directive looks something like this:
<%@ Register TagPrefix="uc" TagName="footer" Src="footer.ascx" %>
As we saw in the previous chapter, .NET currently supports many different languages and there is no limit to the number of languages that could be made available. If you’re used to writing ASP, you may think the choice of VBScript would be obvious. With ASP.NET however, Microsoft has done away with VBScript and replaced it with a more robust and feature-rich alternative: VB.NET. ASP.NET’s support for C# is likely to find favor with developers from other backgrounds. This section will introduce you to both these new languages, which are used throughout the remainder of the book. By the end of this section, you will, I hope, agree that the similarities between the two are astonishing—any differences are minor and, in most cases, easy to figure out.
Traditional server technologies are much more constrained in the choice of development language they offer. For instance, old-style CGI scripts were typically written with Perl or C/C++, JSP uses Java, Coldfusion uses CFML, and PHP is a language in and of itself. .NET’s support for many different languages lets developers choose based on what they’re familiar with, and start from there. To keep things simple, in this book we’ll consider the two most popular, VB.NET and C#, giving you a chance to choose which feels more comfortable to you, or stick with your current favorite if you have one.
Visual Basic.NET or VB.NET is the result of a dramatic overhaul of Microsoft’s hugely popular Visual Basic language. With the inception of Rapid Application Development (RAD) in the nineties, Visual Basic became extremely popular, allowing inhouse teams and software development shops to bang out applications two-to-the-dozen. VB.NET has many new features over older versions of VB, most notably that it has now become a fully object-oriented language. At last, it can call itself a true programming language on a par with the likes of Java and C++. Despite the changes, VB.NET generally stays close to the structured, legible syntax that has always made it so easy to read, use, and maintain.
The official line is that Microsoft created C# in an attempt to produce a programming language that coupled the simplicity of Visual Basic with the power and flexibility of C++. However, there’s little doubt that its development was at least hurried along. Following legal disputes with Sun about Microsoft’s treatment (some would say abuse) of Java, Microsoft was forced to stop developing its own version of Java, and instead developed C# and another language, which it calls J#. We’re not going to worry about J# here, as C# is preferable. It’s easy to read, use, and maintain, because it does away with much of the confusing syntax for which C++ became infamous.
In this chapter, we started out by introducing key aspects of an ASP.NET page including directives, code declaration blocks, code render blocks, includes, comments, and controls. As the chapter progressed, you were introduced to the two most popular languages that ASP.NET supports, which we’ll use throughout the book.
In the next chapter, we’ll create more ASP.NET pages to demonstrate some form processing techniques and programming basics, before we finally dive in and look at object oriented programming for the Web.
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: June 28, 2004
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