A Fast Track Guide to ASP.NET - Chapter 1

Creating ASP.NET Applications in Visual Studio .NET

When using Visual Studio .NET, you select ASP.NET Web Application from the New Project dialog (shown above), and this creates the named web site and creates some default pages. From that point onwards you just use the design environment to drag controls onto the design grid:

You can then use View Code (or the more familiar double-click on a control) to see the code for the web page you are creating.

We're not going to go into any more detail on using Visual Studio .NET, as it's too big a topic and really is outside the scope of this book. What we really want to concentrate on is ASP.NET itself.

Other Installs

There are several other related technologies that are not included as part of .NET, but which you might find useful. These are:

• ODBC .NET Data Provider, which provides access to native ODBC drivers.
• Mobile Internet Toolkit, to allow development of sites that support mobile devices, such as phones and PDAs.
• Internet Explorer Web Controls, provide a set of client controls (such as a TreeView and Tab Control) for use in Internet Explorer.
• Internet Explorer Web Services Behavior.

Not all of these are running to the same timeframe as the .NET SDK, but they should all be available from http://www.Microsoft.com/downloads or from MSDN.

How is ASP.NET Different from ASP?

This question can be answered in one word -- very. ASP.NET is not just a new version, but a whole new idea and way of programming web applications. New features weren't retrofitted into ASP to give us a new version -- ASP.NET has been written from the ground up to provide the best possible application framework. This has meant that, in many areas, compatibility with ASP has been broken, but in the long term this is a good thing. It means that ASP.NET provides a much stronger platform for developing applications, and gives many more benefits.

If you're worried about the compatibility issue, then remember we mentioned earlier that ASP.NET runs alongside ASP. Even though there are many differences between the two, installing ASP.NET won't break existing applications. That's because your existing ASP pages are still processed by the same mechanism as before, and the new framework processes ASP.NET pages. This is achieved by ASP.NET pages having a new file extension (.aspx), meaning they are not processed in the same way as ASP pages.

Compatibility and migration issues are covered in Chapter 23.