What Is a Web Form

What Is a Web Form?

In the early days of the Internet, most Web pages were not interactive, with the exception of hyperlinks that allowed users to quickly navigate from one page to another. (This in itself was an amazingly useful innovation.) Eventually, though, these static pages containing links began to incorporate increasingly complex, dynamic content. In addition to hyperlinks, Web pages began to include forms that could be filled out by the user to allow real applications to run on the Web. The user interface offered by Web Forms is nowhere near as rich as the user interface in a windowing environment; in many cases, however, it is good enough. Perhaps even more important, although Web Forms user interfaces are not always as appropriate as other environments, they are used every day by users of all sorts, and so may be more familiar.

Developers who author Web Forms applications continue to find those applications challenging, especially those developers who do not have a Web background. For developers writing applications for Microsoft technologies, the answer for many years has been Active Server Pages (or ASP) and, more recently, Microsoft ASP.NET. ASP (also sometimes referred to as Classic ASP) commonly used Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) as the scripting language, and it offered only modest designer support. Sure, Microsoft Visual InterDev was a passable HTML designer, but it provided little support to server-side developers. There were no controls, like those that Visual Basic developers were accustomed to, but rather HTML widgets with no server-side support.

However, ASP.NET authoring challenges have gradually decreased with each new version. The first version, ASP.NET 1.0, was released with the .NET environment. The most notable addition in ASP.NET 1.0 was the inclusion of an event model, similar to what Visual Basic developers were used to. To support this event model, ASP.NET 1.0 added Web server controls to allow developers to more easily respond to events raised in the browser. ASP.NET 1.1 primarily cleaned up some minor issues with ASP.NET 1.0. ASP.NET 2.0 (the focus of this book) adds some noteworthy features, all designed to greatly reduce the number of lines of code that developers must write to create a Web Forms application. These new features include several new controls, provider support for member management and security, and the new data source controls that free the developer from a great deal of code previously required to retrieve data from a database.