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Pretty much every ASP.NET page you ever write will store information, or data, in your computer's memory. You'll almost always be getting information from a user and doing something with it, or getting data from somewhere else and showing it to the user. If you don't plan on using information in your programs, you don't need to write a dynamic web site and there is no point in using ASP.NET or Web Matrix – you might as well just type a document in Word and save it on to a web server!
In this chapter, you'll see how you can use your computer's memory to store information, and how you can make that information work for you. Specifically you will learn how to:
Tell your computer what you'll be storing, by declaring variables of different data types
Store, retrieve, and manipulate text when it is in memory
Make your programs do math
Get dates, keep them, and show them off
Technically speaking, a computer's memory doesn't contain information... it contains data. Data becomes information when you put it in a context where people can understand what it means. Your pages are useful if they present information, not just data – your users need to understand it, but to a computer, which really doesn't understand very much, it's all just data.
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