ASP.NET is a very complex topic, and therefore requires a very solid foundation. The first week of this book covers the basics of ASP.NET: what it is and what you need to get started, as well as the fundamental concepts of building ASP.NET pages. These topics will provide you with the concepts necessary for every ASP.NET application; consequently, you will use them very often.
Day 1, "Getting Started with ASP.NET," will be an overview of ASP.NET, including its companion technologies in the .NET Framework. You'll examine installation issues and how you'll be setting up your projects for the rest of this book.
You then dive straight into your first ASP.NET program in Day 2, "Building ASP.NET Pages," to whet your appetite for things to come. You spend a lot of time in Day 2 looking behind the scenes of your ASP.NET pages, which is vitally important for building more complex applications.
Day 3, "Using Visual Basic.NET and C#," discusses everything you need to know about VB.NET and C# to build your ASP.NET pages. You'll learn about control structures, variables, looping logic, and more. With these tools, you'll be able to make your pages do nearly anything!
Day 4, "Using ASP.NET Objects with C# and VB.NET," will be spent introducing and dealing with examples on some of the most common ASP.NET objects. These objects will add tremendous power to your pages.
Day 5, "Beginning Web Forms," introduces you to the Web forms framework, which allows you to easily build and control user interfaces in ASP.NET. This framework consists of server controls, which are the building blocks of your UIs. This framework is also extensible, as you'll see in Day 6, "Learning More About Web Forms," where you'll learn how to build your own server controls. Finally, in Day 7, "Validating ASP.NET Pages," you'll examine another class of server controls, the validation controls, which allow you to validate the input that users enter into your ASP.NET pages easily.
By the end of the week, you will have a solid grip on ASP.NET fundamentals, and be ready to dive into more advanced topics in the following weeks. You're in for a fun ride, so let's get started!
