ASP.NET is a new and powerful technology for writing dynamic web pages. It's a convergence
of two major Microsoft technologie's, Active Server Pages (ASP) and .NET. ASP is
a relative old-timer on the web computing circuit and has provided a sturdy, fast,
and effective way of creative dynamic web pages for more than five years now. .NET
is the new kid on the block and is a whole suite of technologies designed by Microsoft
with the aim of revolutionizing the way in which all programming development is
conducted in the future and the way companies carry out business. Therefore, as
a conjunction of the two, ASP.NET is a way of creating dynamic web pages while making
use of the innovations present in .NET.
The first great thing to note about ASP.NET is that you don't need to know anything
about ASP to get started. All you need is a little bit of HTML knowledge for building
your own web pages, and you're away! ASP.NET is a more powerful technology than
its older namesake, not only can it produce dynamic web pages, but it can tailor
them to the browser you are using. Better still, it comes complete with a wide range
of predefined controls ready for you to use in your own projects, saving you time,
and making you more productive.
So, what can you do with ASP.NET? It'd probably be quicker to list what you can't!
One of the most eye-catching new innovations is the way you can create your applications,
so you ca write them in VB.NET, Jscript, C# (a new Java-like language from Microsoft),
or even a combination of them all – you'll choose the best language for the
job, or whichever language compliments your skills best.
Within your applications ASP.NET allows you to customise pages for a particular
user, keep track of user's details as they move through a website and store information
about them in a database of self-describing XML file. You can alter the layout of
pages at the click of a button, add and remove files from your machines (if you
have the appropriate permissions) and even draw on the logic of other applications
without having to download them first.
In this first chapter we'll be mainly concerned with ASP.NET's installation process.
We'll start with a quick introduction to the world of web servers, dynamic web pages,
and a little bit about what ASP.NET is, but what we really aim to achieve is to
get you running a fully functional web server, with a fully functional ASP.NET installation.
By the end of the chapter you'll have created a short ASP.NET test page, to check
that both the web server and ASP.NET are working as intended. Don't worry we'll
have a look at some of the most common pitfalls encountered, just in case things
don't go as planned!
The topics to be discussed are:
- Static Web Pages
- Dynamic Web Pages
- An overview of the different technologies for creating dynamic web pages, including
ASP.NET
- Installing Internet Information Services (IIS)
- Installing the .NET Framework
- Testing and Troubleshooting your installation
What Is A Static Web Page?
If you surf around the Internet today, you'll see that there are
lots of static web pages out there. What do we mean by a static web page? Essentially,
it's a page whose content consists of some HTML code that was typed directly into
a text editor and saved as an .htm or .html file. Thus, the author of the page has
already completely determined the exact content of the page, in HTML, at some time
before any user visits the page.
Static web pages are often quite easy to spot; sometimes you can pick them out by
just looking at the content of the page. The content (text, images, hyperlinks,
etc.) and appearance of a static web page is always the same – regardless of
who visits the page, or when they visit, or how they arrive at the page, or any
other factors.
For example, suppose we create a page called Welcome.htm for our website, by writing
some simple HTML like this:
Whenever any client comes to our site to view this page, it will look like this.
The content of the page was determined before the request was made – at the
time the webmaster saved the .htm file to disk:
