Running the Samples
From the main QuickStart page you should select Start the ASP.NET QuickStart
Tutorial, where you will be presented with the following screen:
Click on image to see the full view
The left-hand portion of the screen shows the samples broken into their
groups, which are:
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Sample Group
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Consists of …
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Getting Started
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Introduction to ASP.NET and the .NET languages.
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ASP.NET Web Forms
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The basics of ASP.NET page design, including use of
server controls, databases and business objects.
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ASP.NET Web Services
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How to create and use Web Services.
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ASP.NET Web Applications
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What defines an ASP.NET application, and how the global
files are used.
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Cache Services
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The new cache features, allowing pages or data to be
cached to improve performance.
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Configuration
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The new XML-based application configuration.
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Deployment
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A description of how applications are deployed.
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Security
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An examination of the authentication and authorization
features in the .NET framework.
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Localization
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Examples of how internationalization can be achieved.
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Tracing
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How the new tracing features of ASP.NET bring increased
developer productivity.
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Debugging
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How to use the new visual debugger.
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Sample Applications
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Some sample applications, described below.
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We'll see examples of these topics throughout the book.
The right-hand side of the screen will show the samples, including descriptions
and source code. The source code for all of the samples is available in Visual Basic,
C#, and JScript. The use of these languages is discussed later in the chapter.
The Sample Applications
The sample applications should give you some good ideas
of what can be achieved with ASP.NET, as well as showing how it can be achieved
and some best practices for writing applications.
- A Personalized Portal is a sample portal application, allowing user login,
content delivery, user preferences, configuration, and so on. It's an extremely
good example of the use of User Controls, which are reusable ASP.NET pages.
- An E–Commerce Storefront is a small electronic–commerce site,
based around a simple grocery store. It shows some good uses of data binding and
templating, and how a shopping basket system could be implemented.
- A Class Browser Application shows how we can browse through the hierarchy
of classes and objects. Not only is this useful from a learning point of view, but
it also shows how the classes are queried by run-time code. This is one of the great
new features of the framework, and is explained in more detail in the next chapter.
- IBuySpy.com is another electronic–commerce site, showing more features
than the other sample store. It contains user logins, shopping baskets, and so on.
Additional Samples
The above list of samples describes just the ones that
are installed by the SDK, but there are plenty of others available, such as a .NET
version of the Duwamish site. All of the code for the samples in the book is available
from the Wrox Press web site (at www.wrox.com). Microsoft has three additional sites
where information and samples can be obtained:
- www.asp.net is the central site for downloads and links.
- www.ibuyspy.com is the IBuySpy application online. This code runs online
as well as being available as a download (in VB.NET and C#). This site also contains
links to a portal-based version of IBuySpy, allowing user customization, and a news-based
version, aimed at content delivery.
- www.gotdotnet.com
is a community site for all .NET developers. It's full of links and samples by both
Microsoft and third parties. This site also has a list of ASP.NET hosting companies.
There are also plenty of third-party sites, and since this list may change, your
best bet is to go to www.gotdotnet.com and follow the links page.
Visual Studio.NET
Although this book is primarily aimed at ASP.NET, it
is important that we mention Visual Studio.NET as well. The first thing to make
clear is that Visual Studio.NET isn't required to write ASP.NET applications, but
it does provide an extremely rich design environment. It provides features such
as drag and drop for controls, automatic grid and list support, integrated debugging,
Intellisense, and so on.
The installation of Visual Studio.NET comprises several steps:
The Component Update installs the following:
- Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 (this requires a reboot)
- Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0
- Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Web Extensions Client
- Setup Run-time Files
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Internet Tools (this requires a reboot)
- Microsoft Data Access Components 2.7
- Microsoft .NET Framework
The Component Update install allows you to enter a login name and password
to be used during the reboots, so that the entire installation can take place without
user interaction.
The Visual Studio.NET install offers a similar setup to previous versions:
Once this step is finished, you have the option of a check for Service
Releases, to allow product updates to be automatically downloaded for you.
If you've used a previous version of Visual Studio, you may think that
the installed menu items are rather sparse, since you only get two or three items
(depending upon your installation options). What's noticeable is that the two main
items are Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 7.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio.NET Documentation.
Because the underlying .NET architecture changes the way languages are used, Visual
Studio.NET has been built to take this into account. So, no longer do you pick your
language and then run the tool associated with that language. Now you just start
Visual Studio.NET and then decide in which language you wish to write, and the type
of application to create:
What's great about this, is that the development environment is the
same, whatever the language and application. This dramatically reduces training
time, as you don't have to learn a different tool to do something differently.
Creating ASP.NET Applications in
Visual Studio.NET
When using Visual Studio.NET, you select ASP.NET Web
Application from the New Project dialog (shown above), and this creates the named
web site and some default pages. From that point onwards you just use the design
environment to drag controls onto the design grid:
You can then use View Code (or the more familiar double-click on a control)
to see the code for the web page you are creating.
We're not going to go into any more detail on using Visual Studio.NET,
as it's too big a topic and really is outside the scope of this book. What we really
want to concentrate on is ASP.NET itself.
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