A Fast Track Guide to ASP.NET - Chapter 1

The Sample Applications

The sample applications should give you some good ideas of what can be achieved with ASP.NET, as well as showing how it can be achieved and some best practices for writing applications.

• A Personalized Portal is a sample portal application, allowing user login, content delivery, user preferences, configuration, and so on. It's an extremely good example of the use of User Controls, which are reusable ASP.NET pages.
• An E-Commerce Storefront is a small electronic--commerce site, based around a simple grocery store. It shows some good uses of data binding and templating, and how a shopping basket system could be implemented.
• A Class Browser Application shows how we can browse through the hierarchy of classes and objects. Not only is this useful from a learning point of view, but it also shows how the classes are queried by run--time code. This is one of the great new features of the framework, and is explained in more detail in the next chapter.
• IBuySpy.com is another electronic--commerce site, showing more features than the other sample store. It contains user logins, shopping baskets, and so on.

Additional Samples

The above list of samples describes just the ones that are installed by the SDK, but there are plenty of others available, such as a .NET version of the Duwamish site. All of the code for the samples in the book is available from the Wrox Press web site (at www.wrox.com). Microsoft has three additional sites where information and samples can be obtained:

• www.asp.net is the central site for downloads and links.
• www.ibuyspy.com is the IBuySpy application online. This code runs online as well as being available as a download (in VB.NET and C#). This site also contains links to a portal based version of IBuySpy, allowing user customization, and a news based version, aimed at content delivery.
• www.gotdotnet.com is a community site for all .NET developers. It's full of links and samples by both Microsoft and third parties. This site also has a list of ASP.NET hosting companies. There are also plenty of third party sites, and since this list may change, your best bet is to go to gotdotnet.com and follow the links page.

Visual Studio .NET

Although this book is primarily aimed at ASP.NET, it is important that we mention Visual Studio .NET as well. The first thing to make clear is that Visual Studio .NET isn't required to write ASP.NET applications, but it does provides an extremely rich design environment. It provides features such as drag and drop for controls, automatic grid and list support, integrated debugging, Intellisense, and so on.

The installation of Visual Studio .NET comprises several steps:

The Component Update installs the following:

• Windows 2000 Service Pack 2, if installing on Windows 2000 (this requires a reboot)
• Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0
• Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Web Extensions Client
• Setup Runtime Files q Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Internet Tools (this requires a reboot)
• Microsoft Data Access Components 2.7 q Microsoft .NET Framework

The Component Update install allows you to enter a login name and password to be used during the reboots, so that the entire installation can take place without user interaction.

The Visual Studio .NET install offers a similar setup to previous versions:

Once this step is finished, you have the option of a check for Service Releases, to allow product updates to be automatically downloaded for you.

If you've used previous version of Visual Studio, you may think that the installed menu items are rather sparse, since you only get two or three items (depending upon your installation options). What's noticeable is that the two main items are Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Documentation. Because the underlying .NET architecture changes the way languages are used, Visual Studio .NET has been built to take this into account. So, no longer do you pick your language and then run the tool associated with that language. Now you just start Visual Studio .NET and then decide in which language you wish to write, and the type of application to create:

What's great about this, is that the development environment is the same, whatever the language and application. This dramatically reduces training time, as you don't have to learn a different tool to do something differently.