Chapter 2. Effective Web Forms: Creating a Resum Application

Chapter 2. Effective Web Forms: Creating a Resumé Application

In This Chapter:

• Web Form Controls

• Web User Controls

• Page Execution Sequence

• Data Validation

• The Resumé Application

• Extending and Modifying the Resumé Application

• Deploying the Resumé Application

ASP.NET has a collection of objects that make creating user interfaces easy for developers. These objects are server controls that you can place into .aspx pages. Then, when a page is served up by the server to a client machine, the pages are rendered as HTML. The pages execute on the server and generate HTML code that's inserted into the outgoing HTML stream. The browser sees the pages as HTML, whereas the ASP.NET page and developer see them as controls.

Visual Basic developers are used to working with a form onto which they place controls. The addition of the Web Forms paradigm into the ASP.NET realm offers a unified programming model. Even Visual C++ now offers this approach to programming. Having these options means that a developer can more easily switch between developing desktop applications in Visual Basic, C#, or Visual C++ and developing enterprise applications in ASP.NET.

This chapter focuses on the ASP.NET server controls. Various aspects of the controls that are used in Web Forms will be discussed throughout. And to tie all of this together, a Resumé application will be used to demonstrate the topics.

The Resumé application performs database access via the ADO.NET namespace. Because I want to focus on Web Forms, the explanations in this area will be limited to explanations of the resumé code itself and will not include in-depth ADO.NET explanations. A more complete explanation of ADO.NET can be found in Chapter 3.

NOTE: This book is intended for VB and C# programmers. The Web site (described later in this chapter) contains both VB and C# code. I will also alternate the language used in each chapter between VB and C#. The featured applications for the even-numbered chapters are in C#, and the featured applications for the odd-numbered chapters are in VB. For example, this chapter's application is written in C#, the next is in VB, and so forth.

Code snippets that illustrate a topic and that are not part of the application will be shown in both VB and C#.