From Dan Mabbutt,
Your Guide to Visual Basic.
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Apr 12 2008

This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed building their own web pages using ASP.NET 2.0. In this tutorial, I concentrate on using free software tools from Microsoft including Visual Web Developer 2008 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express. To get the most from this tutorial, you might want to start at the beginning:

Part 1 - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial - Programming for the networked world.

It's all about the data

ASP.NET 2.0 is perfectly capable of working with no data, data from sequential files, data from instruments or peripherals, or almost anything a standalone program can do. But nearly all of the world's actual systems use data from a database. And ASP.NET 2.0 works best with Microsoft's database, SQL Server. To prove it, check out these integrated features designed just for databases in Visual Web Developer 2008 (from now on VWD):

• Database Explorer
  Click on the View menu to open the Database Explorer window. This is a hierarchical view (like Solution Explorer that you have seen in both VB.NET and VWD) of the databases your application has connections for and all the things that are in them.
• Database Tools
  Click on Tools > Options... and then make sure the Show all settings checkbox is selected. Database Tools lets you select settings like the timeout value for transactions, the default query, and the default length of columns (like char and binary columns) that will be used.
• The Connect to Database... wizard
  This wizard located under Tools walks you through a database connection for SQL Server and other popular databases.

We'll see more of these as we we discover how to integrate data from a SQL Server database into a web site. We'll use VWD in this segment of the tutorial to demonstrate the features of SQL Server.

By this time, you should have installed Microsoft's free SQL Server 2005 Express (from now on SSE) database alongside VWD. You can download it from the same web page you found VWD on. The "big brother" to SSE is SQL Server 2005 (no "Express Edition") and is used for some of the largest and most demanding database applications in the world. SSE is totally compatible, however. So you can develop on SSE and be assured of a straightforward migration to the more powerful SQL Server 2005 when you're ready.

Before we tie together VWD and SSE together, let's take a brief look at SSE by itself just to get more familiar with it.