Build Your Own ASP.NET 3.5 Website Using C# & VB (6 page)

xxix

Tips, Notes, and Warnings

Hey, You!

Tips will give you helpful little pointers.

Ahem, Excuse Me …

Notes are useful asides that are related—but not critical—to the topic at hand.

Think of them as extra tidbits of information.

Make Sure You Always …

… pay attention to these important points.

Watch Out!

Warnings will highlight any gotchas that are likely to trip you up along the way.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank the SitePoint team, and especially Andrew Tetlaw, for being extremely supportive during the process of writing this book.

—Cristian Darie

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Licensed to [email protected]

Introducing ASP.NET and

the .NET Platform

ASP.NET is one of the most exciting web development technologies on offer today.

When Microsoft released the first version in 2002, many web developers thought

all their dreams had come true. Here was a powerful platform with lots of built-in

functionality, astonishing performance levels, and one of the best IDEs (Integrated

Development Environments) around: Visual Studio. What more could anyone want?

Indeed, ASP.NET showed the way for the faster, easier, and more disciplined development of dynamic web sites, and the results were impressive. Time has passed, and ASP.NET has grown. ASP.NET 3.5 comes with extraordinary

new features as well as an expanded and more powerful underlying framework.

Not only that, but the basic versions of all development tools, including Visual Web

Developer 2008 Express Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, are still free!

This book shows you how to use all these technologies together in order to produce

fantastic results. We’ll take you step by step through each task, showing you how

to get the most out of each technology and tool. Let’s begin!

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Build Your Own ASP.NET 3.5 Web Site Using C# & VB

What is ASP.NET?

ASP.NET is a sophisticated and powerful web development framework. If you’ve

never used ASP.NET before, it will likely take you some time and patience to grow

accustomed to it. Development with 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. However, we believe you’ll find the benefits amply

reward the learning effort!

In the next few sections, we’ll introduce you to the basics of ASP.NET. We’ll walk

through the process of installing it on your web server, and look at a simple example

that demonstrates how ASP.NET pages are constructed. But 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
. Okay, let’s break that jargon-filled sentence down.

ASP.NET is a server-side technology
. That is, it runs on the web server. Most web

designers cut their teeth learning client-side technologies such as HTML, JavaScript,

and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). When a web browser requests a web page created

with only client-side technologies, the web server simply grabs the files that the

browser (or client) requests and sends them down the line. The client is entirely

responsible for reading the markup in those files and interpreting that markup to

display the page on the screen.

Server-side technologies such as ASP.NET, however, are a different story. 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 to generate the HTML, JavaScript, and

CSS, which is then sent to the browser. Since the processing of the ASP.NET code

occurs on the server, it’s called a server-side technology
. As Figure 1.1
shows, the client only sees the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The server is entirely responsible

for processing the server-side code.

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Introducing ASP.NET and the .NET Platform

3

Figure 1.1. A user interacting with a web application

Note the three roles involved in such a transaction:

user

The transaction starts and ends with the user. The user operates the

web client software and interprets the results.

web client

This is the software program that the person uses to interact with

the web application. The client is usually a web browser, such as

Internet Explorer or Firefox.

web server

This is the software program located on the server. It processes requests made by the web client.
ASP.NET is a technology for developing web applications.
A web application is just

a fancy name for a dynamic web site. Web applications usually (but not always)

store information in a database, and allow visitors to the site to access and change

that information. Many different programming technologies and supported languages

have been developed to create web applications; PHP, JSP, Ruby on Rails, CGI, and

ColdFusion are just a few of the more popular ones. However, rather than tying you

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Build Your Own ASP.NET 3.5 Web Site Using C# & VB

to a specific technology and language, ASP.NET lets you write web applications in

a variety of familiar programming languages.

ASP.NET uses the Microsoft .NET Framework.
The .NET Framework collects all

the technologies needed for building Windows desktop applications, web applications, web services, and so on, into a single package, and makes them available to more than 40 programming languages.

Even with all the jargon explained, you’re probably still wondering what makes

ASP.NET so good. The truth is that there are many server-side technologies around,