Chapter 1: A Fast Track Guide to ASP.NET

Overview

Microsoft's .NET technology has attracted a great deal of press since Beta 1 was first released to the world. Since then, mailing lists, newsgroups, and web sites have sprung up containing a mixture of code samples, applications, and articles of various forms. Even if you're not a programmer using existing ASP technology, it's a good bet that you've at least heard of .NET, even if you aren't quite sure what it involves. After all, there's so much information about .NET that it's sometimes hard to filter out what you need from what's available. With new languages, new designers, and new ways of programming, you might wonder exactly what you need to write ASP.NET applications.

That's where this chapter comes in, because we are going to explain exactly what is required, and how to go about using it. The aim is to get you up and running, able to write simple ASP.NET pages as quickly as possible, and give you a solid grounding in the basics of the new framework. This will not only benefit existing ASP programmers, but also people who haven't used ASP, including Visual Basic programmers who need to write web applications. ASP.NET makes the whole job much easier, whatever your skill set.

In particular, we will look at:

• Installing and testing ASP.NET.

• The benefits of the new technology.

• The basic differences between ASP and ASP.NET.

• The new programming model.

• The rich hierarchy of server controls.

We start with the simple discussion of why ASP.NET has come about.