Object Oriented C# for ASP.NET Developers

Summary

Well! It's been a long trip, but in this article I've taken you on a tour of all the important object-oriented features of the C# language. What's more, I've shown you how they apply to ASP.NET Web development.

In particular, I've demonstrated how to use a class to handle some of the logic in a simple page that tracks the growth of trees. In a practical system, each Tree class might for instance fetch its information from a database of national forest growth. The point is that the ASP.NET page doesn't need to know how to track the growth of trees, because all that functionality is bottled up in a handy class that we can reuse in other projects if needed.

By far the most exciting application of object oriented programming concepts to everyday ASP.NET development, however, is the fact that everything in ASP.NET is an object. By defining a class in a Code-Behind file for each of our pages, we can totally separate the server-side logic of our pages from their design, thus letting our Web designers sleep at night. In fact, you could even make two or more different .aspx pages that inherit from the same Code-Behind file in order to experiment with different page designs (perhaps a WAP version of your site for mobile devices?) that share the same server-side logic.

In the next article in this series, I'll introduce you to event-driven programming. It turns out that .NET classes (including most of those that make up ASP.NET) can send out events that your code can listen for and react to. We'll see how these events are used to achieve some common tasks in ASP.NET development.

See you next time!