Chapter 2 Web Development in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005

Overview

No matter how you design and implement a Web application, at the end of the day it always consists of a number of pages bound to a public URL. The inexorable progress of Web-related technologies has not changed this basic fact, for the simple reason that it is the natural outcome of the simplicity of the HTTP protocol. As long as HTTP remains the underlying transportation protocol, a Web application can't be anything radically different from a number of publicly accessible pages. So in this context, what's the role of Microsoft ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET 2005?

ASP.NET provides an abstraction layer on top of HTTP with which developers build Web sites and Web-based front-ends for enterprise systems. Thanks to ASP.NET, developers can work with high-level entities such as classes and components within the object-oriented paradigm. Development tools assist developers during the work and try to make the interaction with the ASP.NET framework as seamless and productive as possible. Development tools are ultimately responsible for the application or the front-end being created and deployed to users. They offer their own programming model and force developers to play by those rules.

The key development tool for building ASP.NET applications and front-ends is Visual Studio .NET 2005 the successor to Visual Studio .NET 2003. It has a lot of new features and goodies expressly designed for Web developers to overcome some of the limitations that surfaced from using Visual Studio .NET 2003.

In this chapter, we'll review the main characteristics and features of Visual Studio .NET 2005 as far as ASP.NET applications are concerned. We'll see changes made to the project, new IDE and editing features, and deployment capabilities.