What Does This Book Cover?

This book will take you from very little knowledge to the point where you can construct data-driven websites, and give you an overview of some of the deeper areas of ASP.NET. Here's what you can expect to see as you work through the book:

Section 1 – Getting Started

The first part of the book will help to get your environment set up correctly, and show you how to create simple pages in ASP.NET using Visual Basic .NET:

• Chapter 1: Installing and Exploring Web Matrix – this chapter guides you through all the steps required to get Web Matrix, the .NET Framework, and an MSDE database installed on your system.

• Chapter 2: Writing Your First ASP.NET Web Page – the first example in the book that teaches you how to construct web pages in Web Matrix, using a simple dice game as the example.

• Chapter 3: Creating Web Pages – start to learn more about web controls in this chapter, and how to create web pages using them.

• Chapter 4: Writing Code – in this chapter, we start to explain how Visual Basic .NET code works, and how we can write code in our pages that can be used for decision-making, looping through a set of instructions, and encapsulating functionality in a method.

• Chapter 5: Storing Different Types of Data – discover more about variables, and ultimately objects, in a chapter that discusses data types.

• Chapter 6: Working with Collections of Data – learn how to store collections of data in programming structures such as arrays, arraylists, and hashtables, before looking at namespaces and classes in a bit more detail.

• Chapter 7: Debugging and Error Handling – errors happen to all of us, so in this chapter, learn the difference between errors and exceptions, and how to cope when it doesn't all go quite to plan.

Section 2 – Working With Databases

Most websites that have useful functionality built into them will probably rely on a database at some stage or another. These chapters in this section are designed to introduce you to the database management tools in Web Matrix, as well as teaching you how to programmatically access and manipulate data in your code:

• Chapter 8: Working with Databases – start by creating a database, learn how to connect to this database, and then add data to it. Also, we look at how to connect to the sample databases provided with MSDE.

• Chapter 9: Displaying Data – discover how simple it is to display data from a database using some of the built-in controls that come with ASP.NET and Web Matrix.

• Chapter 10: Working with Data – learn what the auto-generated code actually does, and gain a deeper understanding of .NET data management.

Section 3 – Creating a Website

The third, and final, part of the book involves moving beyond the simple page-by-page model we use to this point, and looking at how to structure pages so that they flow together to form a cohesive unit that is a website. This section also looks at bigger issues involved in this process, such as remembering visitors to your sites and building and consuming web services.

• Chapter 11: Linking to Pages and Files – turning individual pages into a collection of related resources that form a website, also looking at smartening the appearance of sites using stylesheets.

• Chapter 12: Reusable Content – encapsulating functionality into user controls that can be reused across a whole site with relative ease, saving hours of development time.

• Chapter 13: Case Study Part 1: Extending your Web Applications – this chapter opens up our website to the world, and allows users to enter information into our database. Specifically, we'll implement a guest book that our visitors can sign after visiting the site.

• Chapter 14: Case Study Part 2: Identifying your Users – we move on to the second part of our application, which starts to add authentication to the site, forcing users to log in so that they can access certain functionality.

• Chapter 15: Remembering your Visitors – at this stage, we discuss remembering our visitors using tools such as cookies, which can store simple information about a visitor to a site. We also look at how users are remembered between pages using session and application state.

• Chapter 16: Web Services – discover more about web services, one of the buzzwords that many people talk about. Learn how simple it is to create and use web services using Web Matrix.

• Chapter 17: Beyond Web Matrix – a quick look at where you can go next having learned how to use Web Matrix to create simple pages and sites. This chapter previews Visual Studio .NET, and discusses other products available for larger-scale development.