Learn ASP.NET 2.0 - ASP.NET 2.0 Code-Behind and Database Updating

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.

The tricks behind "code-behind"

In previous lessons, we've learned about how a web page received from an ASP.NET 2.0 server is really the result of the execution of programming on the server. The general term for this is "code-behind" because there's a program "behind" the HTML presentation page. I briefly mentioned that the presentation page and the code page are merged to create a single class. That is the code that the server executes.

You can actually see the generated code that is created by ASP.NET. When you start programming advanced applications, you might need to check out these files to find out what the generated code actually does. But even as you're starting out, it's educational to see the actual code that your system uses.

Finding the files might not be obvious. Books and even Microsoft's latest instructions don't cover all the situations. They usually tell you to look in ...

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\versionNumber\Temporary ASP.NET Files

That doesn't work with Framework v3.5 and Vista. Probably the best way is to search for it. Make sure you allow the search to look in hidden and system files and search your entire hard drive. I found it on my system in:

C:\Users\mycomputername\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files

When you finally find it, you will discover that there are actually three VB.NET code files with generated names for uniqueness. (But one DLL that results from compiling them together.) On my system, they were:

App_Web_tywxypeq.0.vb
App_Web_tywxypeq.1.vb
App_Web_tywxypeq.2.vb