Chapter 14: ASP.NET Web Forms

Overview

ASP.NET is Microsoft's latest set of tools and technology for web programmers to use in their quest to produce extendible web applications. The editor used by many developers for writing solutions that capitalize on ASP.NET is Visual Studio .NET. The language in which ASP.NET applications may be written varies. Visual Basic or C# are the most common languages of choice, and C# is featured in this chapter.

Visual Basic is a popular language used for programming on the Microsoft platform. Microsoft has been adding new features and options to Visual Basic through version 6 without sacrificing backward compatibility. Version 7 of Visual Basic ships with Visual Studio .NET; with this version, support for legacy versions of the language has been abandoned. A VB6 snippet of code will not likely compile in Visual Basic .NET (version 7). Visual Basic .NET does offer a great deal of new functionality, such as true inheritance, making it a true object-oriented (OO) language.

Given that the C++, Java, and JavaScript style languages seem to have a large influence on the web programming community, it would seem that a language that closely resembles the style of syntax emulated in those languages would be better suited as a web programming language. C#, a new language offered by Microsoft with Visual Studio .NET, attempts to offer the programmer the benefits of existing languages such as C++ and Java, while excluding legacy aspects of each respective language that diminish from the language's value. As a result, C# will be used to demonstrate the production of ASP.NET web forms in this chapter.

Because VB programmers will need to learn a new language syntax and some architecture to advance to the Visual Studio. NET Integrated Design Environment (IDE), C# would seem a logical choice for expanding their language horizons. Although C# is a Microsoft technology-specific language, so is Visual Basic. However, C# follows a convention that is more familiar to programmers accustomed to using languages such as Java.