Chapter 18: Basic Web Programming

Overview

Windows Forms is the technology for writing Windows applications; with ASP.NET, Web applications that are displayed in any browser can be built. ASP.NET allows you to write Web applications in a similar way to that in which Windows applications are developed. This is made possible by server-side controls that abstract the HTML code and mimic the behavior of the Windows controls. Of course, there are still many differences between Windows and Web applications because of the underlying technologies HTTP and HTML on which Web applications are based.

This chapter provides an overview of programming Web applications with ASP.NET, how to use Web controls, how to deal with state management (this is very different from how it's handled in Windows applications), how to perform authentication, and how to read and write data to and from a database.

In this chapter, you learn about:

• What happens on the server when a HTML request is sent from the client

• How to create a simple Web page

• Using Web server controls in a Web page (and seeing the HTML code they generate)

• Adding event handlers to act on user actions

• Using validation controls to validate user input

• State management with different methods such as ViewState, cookies, and session, application, and cache objects

• Authentication and authorization features that are offered with new ASP.NET 2.0 controls

• Displaying data from the database and updating data in the database