You will need a minimum hardware and software platform to work on. Although it's possible to make things work on Windows 98, I recommend at least Windows 2000 or Windows XP and Visual Studio .NET. In later parts of this tutorial, you'll also need MSDE, the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine. An introduction to MSDE can be found in a lesson from my Complete VB.NET Tutorial. (This lesson is based on a book, but you don't need the book to get a lot of good information about MSDE from it.)
Fortunately, you can get started very much on the cheap. If you have the .NET Framework (you can download it free from Microsoft), you can create ASP.NET applications using only Notepad. You can copy your files manually to a .NET capable server and run them there. For example, you can create the simple app's listed in a few paragraphs in Notepad and upload them to a free server, such as a free educational account at Brinkster, and run them there. But sooner or later, developing in ASP.NET will likely require an investment in software or a hosting service or both. When you start developing systems using "web forms" and "code behind" programs, you'll discover that the complexity of trying to manage all the pieces together is virtually impossible without a tool like Visual Studio .NET.
