| You can use any text editor you like when writing ASP.NET applications, and the same applies to the recipes in this book. However, as professional developers, we prefer to use Visual Studio .NET, mainly because it offers a rich design environment and Intellisense. Other advantages include drag-and-drop server controls, integrated debugging, and automatic deployment. To our way of thinking, these advantages make a strong case for using Visual Studio for all your ASP.NET development. For these reasons, all the recipes in this book have been set up for use with Visual Studio .NET. That said, you can still make use of the code in this book even if you don't have a copy of Visual Studio .NET. (The one exception is in Chapter 11, where using Visual Studio saves so much time and effort that we elected to gear all of the recipes for this platform.) The most tangible effect of our gearing the code to Visual Studio .NET is that all the @ Page directives in all the .aspx pages in this book have a CodeBehind attribute to identify the source file for the code-behind page, something that Visual Studio does automatically when you create an ASP.NET project. If you are not using Visual Studio .NET, you'll need to substitute an Src attribute for the CodeBehind attribute in each recipe. For instance, here is a sample of the kind of @ Page directive you'll find in this book: <%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind ="QuickAndDirtyDatagridVB.aspx.vb" Inherits="QuickAndDirtyDatagridVB"%>
And here is how you would modify it when not using Visual Studio .NET: <%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" Src ="QuickAndDirtyDatagridVB.aspx.vb" Inherits="QuickAndDirtyDatagridVB"%>
| 