Chapter 1. Technology, Tools, and Getting Started

1. Technology, Tools, and Getting Started

When microsoft released the .NET Framework 1.0 Technology Preview in July 2000, it was immediately clear that Web development was going to change. The company's then-current technology, Active Server Pages 3.0 (ASP), was powerful and flexible, and it made the creation of dynamic Web sites easy. ASP spawned a whole series of books, articles, Web sites, and components, all to make the development process even easier. What ASP didn't have, however, was an application framework; it was never an enterprise development tool. Everything you did in ASP was code orientedyou just couldn't get away with not writing code.

ASP.NET was designed to counter this problem. One of its key design goals was to make programming easier and quicker by reducing the amount of code you have to create. Enter the declarative programming model, a rich server control hierarchy with events, a large class library, and support for development tools from the humble Notepad to the high-end Visual Studio .NET. All in all, ASP.NET was a huge leap forward.

Now, with the release of version 2.0, we've seen another giant step towards increased developer productivity. The feature set of ASP.NET has increased, with more server controls and APIs wrapping functionality, reducing the amount of code you need to write. The toolset has also improved, with Visual Studio 2005 having more features, a better designer, and greater support for standards and validation. Along with Visual Studio 2005, there is Visual Web Developer Express Edition, a cut-down (but not by much) version of Visual Studio that provides the same great development environment for an unbeatable priceit's free!