Chapter 1 The Web Forms Environment

Overview

To say that the Internet has changed the software development landscape is a tremendous understatement. Prior to Web application development there was generally a single type of platform on which applications were developed. For instance, when I first began developing software, I wrote software for glass teletype environments, initially on the Atari 800, but eventually on the IBM PC under MS-DOS. Although the programming languages and the system calls required on the two machines were very different, the overall paradigm was exactly the same. When Microsoft Windows took over for MS-DOS in the microcomputer operating system market early in the 1990s, I found that Windows software development was very different from glass teletype development. I now had to deal with multiple windows and threads, an event-driven program management loop, and a great many more system calls.

However, having worked with one windowing environment, I saw that working in any other windowing environment was still not a great leap in understanding. Although Windows desktop applications are still very popular, today we know that the Web application environment is tremendously important to businesses large and small. But Web applications also come with differences in how we develop and deploy software, as well as significant differences in how we view the application's programming model. The differences are significant: stateful vs. stateless, hosted environments, and a myriad of target client environments. Web Forms applications might need to run on the PC, the Macintosh, or even Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs and Smartphones, which all run very different browsers. And so, developers must program Web applications differently than they did for traditional desktop applications.