Chapter 1. ASP.NET 2.0

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please , your Majesty?"

"Begin at the beginning" the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end, then stop."

Lewis Carroll

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter XII

ASP.NET 2.0 is the successor to ASP.NET 1.x, which was the successor, in turn to Active Server Pages (ASP) and is now, arguably, the most popular and powerful way to write interactive Web Applications. Along with the development of ASP.NET has come the rapid evolution of Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005), once again arguably the most powerful and flexible tool for creating interactive web applications. VS2005 does not excel at laying out web pages (there are better tools for that, such as Dreamweaver) but nothing comes close for building interactive web sites, especially data-driven sites that interact with a server-side database.

"Begin at the Beginning"

There are two ways to read this book. The first way is to read its chapters in sequence, beginning with Chapter 1, which explains the .NET Framework and the new features of ASP.NET 2.0, and then Chapter 2, which provides a rapid tour of Visual Studio 2005. These chapters will equip you with the concepts and tools you need to get started. You can proceed through the remaining chapters, working your way through their exercises, we hope, and building more complex skills as you go.

The second way is put this book down, open VS2005, create a new web site (File New Web Site) and start building an application by dragging and dropping controls onto forms, diving into the appropriate chapter when (and if) you need help or deeper understanding of a topic.

Either approach is fine with us. We didn't write the book to be a step-by-step tutorial and there is no law saying you have to read the chapters in order, but we did try to avoid forward references, so you may be better off reading the book in the traditional manner after all.

Microsoft first announced ASP.NET 1.0 (then called ASP+) and the .NET Framework in July, 2000. In essence, .NET was a new development framework that provided a fresh application programming interface to the services and APIs of classic Windows operating systems, especially Windows 2000, while bringing together a number of disparate technologies that emerged from Microsoft during the late 1990s. Among the latter are COM+ component services, a commitment to XML and object-oriented design, support for new web services protocols such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Service Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), and a focus on the Internet.

With more than five years of experience and developer feedback, Microsoft has released the .NET Framework 2.0, VS2005, and most important for you, ASP.NET 2.0. The goal of ASP.NET 2.0 was to reduce the coding required to build ASP.NET applications by 70 percent compared with ASP.NET 1.x; an amazing achievement. With the latest tools, you can focus on the business logic of your application and drag and drop controls that provide virtually all the plumbing for you.