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.
A quick tour of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
If you have worked with VB.NET 2008 Express, you're already familiar with most of the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (VWD from now on) system. (If you haven't, I recommend that you take the Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial. The course you are taking now assumes you have some familiarity with Visual Basic.) But VWD has a few features that you won't find in VB.NET.
And if you would like to start at the beginning of this course, Click here for: Part 1 of an About Visual Basic Tutorial.
To help make this course as productive as possible for you, this segment of the tutorial will cover some of the features of VWD. But since this is a course in VB.NET programming, and not a web design course, we won't go over features like CSS and Styles that are there to make your page look good.
The first thing to get completely clear is that VWD does not stand alone. You must have several other software components. We covered one in the previous segment: SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (or another database ... you can use almost any database with VWD).
Another program you'll need, of course, is a browser. Microsoft understands that the world doesn't use the Internet Explorer Browser exclusively, so VWD gives you a way to use alternative browsers to make sure your web page looks as good in them as it does in IE. The Browse With... selection under the File menu lets you select a different browser to view web pages. You can add a new browser to the list displayed and then use it to view files within VWD using the Add button in the Browse With... window. And you can make it the default in the same window. You can even select different size monitors to simulate.
The interaction between these different systems is the heart of ASP.NET programming. Code may actually be executed in the browser (the client), the server, or the database. You have to understand which one will run the code. This will be explained in examples in this tutorial.
In addition to these programs your system can also interact with other computers over a network using web services or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. Under the Website menu, you can include interactions with web services into your project. You find these just after the Add Reference... function that's approximately the same as VB.NET. The new functions are Add Web Reference... and Add Service Reference....
Add Service Reference... lets you add references to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. You may have seen Add Service Reference... in VB.NET 2008. The dialog used by both systems is identical. WCF is the Microsoft technology for creating distributed applications and bundles technologies like .NET Remoting, DCOM, and MSMQ into a single technology. Expect to see much more of WCF in the future, but in this course we're going to stick to the basics.
Add Web Reference... lets you browse for Web services. (Microsoft seems to have named these backwards but that's what it is.) But then you can add it as a Web reference to your project. The Web services can be anywhere from your local computer to commercial Web services on the Internet.
When looking for things in VWD, remember that the Website menu is roughly the same as the Project menu in VB.NET. For example, Property Pages where Startup Options are set can be found there. And instead of selecting the program that is started first, VWD lets you set the page that is started first. And keep in mind that VWD lets you develop more than one website in the same solution. The menus in VWD change to reflect what you're doing. When you add two websites to the same solution, you will see more options, such as the Project Build Order... in the Website menu.
ASP.NET uses a number of "special folders" that have a defined meaning. Two that you will run into right away are ...
- App_Code
This folder holds code files, such as classes, that VWD will compile and make available to your website project. - App_Data
If you add a database or XML file to your project, it will be kept here. This is a good place to keep sensitive files because the user will never have direct access to files in this folder.
These aren't the only special folders but others won't be covered until we actually use them.
