Chapter 1. ASP.NET Basics | ASP.NET for Web Designers

On the move with ASP.NET

It was a dark and stormy night in Chicago. The kind you expect to see in a black-and-white 1940's movie. Frank Garrison stood with his back tight against the wall, expecting the worst…. WAIT A MINUTE!!! This is the wrong book for that type of opening. Sorry.

Seriously now. I'm guessing that you are reading this book because you're interested in learning about Microsoft's newest web technology: ASP.NET. If you spent any time perusing newsgroups on web design, or any of the zillions of web sites dedicated to the topic of web applications, you probably have heard at the very least a murmur about this mysterious creature.

For the most part, the people talking about .NET are programmers. They speak in a language all their own, discussing things such as objects, namespaces, scope and the like as if everyone should know what these terms mean and how they apply to .NET. Even books on the subject of .NET are being written by programmers with this same outlook. "Well, it's obvious that the page class is used to create an instance of the page object which falls under the system.web.UI namespace." Sheesh. Who wants to read and attempt to decipher that? I'm assuming you don't, and that's why I'm writing this book. To explain to web designers what ASP.NET is in plain English.

I want to avoid just like you, I'm assuming the techno-babble associated with typical programming books and help you understand how powerful ASP.NET is without boring you with every technical nook and cranny in the language.

I am going to explain ASP.NET and its concepts through simple examples, metaphors, and everyday language that you and I can understand. Through this I hope you will see that grasping ASP.NET isn't like scaling a towering skyscraper of information, but like bringing together a series of small building blocks of logical systems to lay a foundation on which you can create powerful web function without being a master architect.

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