Looking Ahead

As you ve seen, sending e-mail messages from your Web pages is not a particularly difficult process. In this chapter, we explored a few simple ways to use e-mail in Web applications. You can probably imagine many more uses for e-mail. Some people like to use e-mail alerts for error conditions. For example, you might have your application send you an e-mail alert if your Web pages can t read the database. You could easily create a page that sends a newsletter to a list of recipients whose e-mail addresses are stored in a database. As you develop your own Web applications, you ll want to keep an eye out for interesting and useful places where sending e-mail messages can enhance the application.

And speaking of developing your own Web applications, I m now going to step out of the picture. In this book s 15 chapters, you learned the fundamentals of creating programmed Web pages using Web Matrix and ASP.NET. You created more than a dozen Web pages that illustrate many of the techniques that Web programmers use all the time getting user input, working with controls, storing values between postbacks, reading and writing information in databases, sending e-mail messages, and many more.

I hope that you ve enjoyed creating the Web pages in this book and that you want to explore ASP.NET further. As I said in Chapter 2, ASP.NET is a sophisticated and very capable framework that allows you to create everything from the simple Web pages we started with to commercial-grade Web applications. I recommend that you take advantage of the Community features I discussed in Chapter 4 to learn more about ASP.NET or, if you like, investigate the many titles about ASP.NET published by Microsoft Press. Above all, I urge you to write many more Web pages using ASP.NET to sharpen your skills. Happy Web programming!