Preface

It was late in the afternoon on a cold and rainy day in 1996 as we sat in the office in Birmingham, England, staring at a blank page in Internet Explorer 3 and wondering when the old Gateway 386 server under the desk would finally finish grinding through a dbWeb query and produce some results. The e-mail, from a small offshoot of the IIS team at Microsoft, arrived as we waited, asking if we would be interested in looking at a new product ("still under development") called Denali. Why not? It seemed that the case study for the final chapter of our book on Web site and database integration was going nowhere.

So we installed Denali 0.9 and started to play with it. Somewhere about ten in the evening, blown away by what we were seeing, the decision was made. The final chapter of the book would be a preview of this amazing new technologyreleased to the public some months later as Active Server Pages. Little did we realize then that this one event would determine the direction of our future writing career, right up to the current day.

What is remarkable, comparing ASP 1.0 with the current ASP.NET 2.0 release, is how much has changed in the past ten years. Our first book about ASP included the history of the Internet, a comprehensive reference to HTML 3.2 and a new styling language called CSS, a full tutorial on VBScript, plus descriptions and examples of every object, method, and property of ASP and its associated database access technology, called ActiveX Data Objects. We even had room in the 1,000 or so pages to cover the SQL language, using MTS and MSMQ, building COM components, a few case studies, and a raft of appendices.

Now, with ASP.NET, we could fill 1,000 pages just describing server controls. ASP.NET has grown up to become a fully fledged, rich, and all-encompassing language-agnostic technology suitable for building any type of Web-based application. Covering all of ASP.NET 2.0 and the associated .NET Framework classes to the same level of detail as our first book on Active Server Pages would fill a whole shelf in your bookcase!

Instead, this book aims to provide you with the concise and detailed information on ASP.NET 2.0 that you need to build great Web sites and Web-based applications. We've attempted to share with you our passion for ASP.NET, our experience of working with it over many years, and our long and fruitful relationship with the team at Microsoft. We hope that you, too, will develop the same passion for ASP.NET as we have.

What Do I Need to Use This Book?

This book is aimed at developers who are reasonably familiar with the Web, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the C# language. We have tried to avoid using code or concepts that are obscure or unduly complex, instead concentrating on the techniques and technologies in ASP.NET 2.0.

The examples were developed in Visual Studio 2005, though you can use Visual Web Developer (VWD) if you only have this available. You will also need access to a databaseeither SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server Express Edition as installed with Visual Studio 2005 and VWD. You can download the examples, and run many of them online, from our server at http://www.daveandal.net/books/8344/. Alternatively, you can obtain the samples from the Addison-Wesley Web site at http://www.awprofessional.com/msdotnetseries.