Chapter 1: Introduction to ASP.NET

ASP.NET (acronym for Active Server Pages) is Microsoft’s technology for creating dynamic, rich, attractive and scalable web applications that run on server instead on client’s pc. Before ASP.NET, (in the era of CGI standard) web servers had to launch a separate instance of a website for each request. This method, as you can imagine, can generate problems for a famous website that accepts hundreds of requests in a minute. It would definitely generate a lot of load on the web server. To fix this Microsoft created technologies like ASP and ASP.NET. The original ASP technology became very famous, more than Microsoft could imagine. ASP was being used in almost every category of websites. The developers of ASP didn’t design it with that picture in mind, so it started to fall. To correct the mistakes of ASP, ASP.NET was developed as an industry strength web application framework that could address the limitations of ASP.

---

Note: ASP and ASP.NET despite having the same name (or partially same name) are radically different from each other. You can learn the differences between ASP and ASP.NET via internet. They won’t be covered in this tutorial.

---

Before server side programming, web developers widely used client side programming to enhance their websites (Client side programming is also used widely today). In client side programming, the developer included embedded applets (a very small application that performs a specific task) that were downloaded on the client’s computer and were executed on client’s pc rather than the server.

One of the major problems in this methodology that it wasn’t supported equally by all browsers or operating systems. So, the developers had to test their web applications in different browsers and operating systems and even had to provide browser updates. Server side programming was a better alternative.

Server Side Programming:
In server side programming, as used in ASP.NET, all the web application code is executed on the server and the client’s browser just receives the HTML document.

This figure explains how server side programming works (Click on it to enlarge):

So, that’s all for Chapter 1: Introduction to ASP.NET. In the next chapter, we will create a simple web application using ASP.NET 3.5. Make sure you read the section basic skills and requirements before proceeding to Chapter 2: Creating A Simple ASP.NET Page.

ASP.NET Tutorial:

Hello friends, welcome to ASP.NET tutorial by hard.CoderX (). In this tutorial, you’re gonna learn basic and some advance features of ASP.NET and how to implement them in your website. In end of each chapter, we’ll present you a real-world problem you might face while making a website in ASP.NET. Before jumping to Chapter 1: Introduction to ASP.NET let us go through with the basic software requirements and skills one should have before reading this tutorial:

• You must have ASP.NET 3.5 installed on your PC (It comes with .NET Framework 3.5 or higher), ASP.NET 2.0 will also work. If there is a feature which is present in ASP.NET 3.5 and not in ASP.NET 2.0, we’ll state it explicitly. Since you can access the features of ASP.NET 2.0 while having ASP.NET 3.5 installed, we recommend you to have ASP.NET 3.5 installed.


• We’re using Visual Studio 2008 Professional edition for this tutorial. You can install Visual Studio 2008 express (free edition) if you don’t wanna buy a license! However, if you don’t want to spare your time in hundreds of MBs of downloading, you can do the same work in Visual Web Developer 2008, which is designed specifically for working in ASP.NET WebPages.


• You must have basic knowledge of Object Oriented Programming concepts, as well as the knowledge of C#. C# basic know-how (like creating classes, calling methods, using event-handlers) is compulsory.



• Basic knowledge of HTML and / or XHTML is compulsory. Though if you don’t know about HTML or XHTML, don’t worry, you can learn about them from http://www.w3schools.com/. This is the place from where I learnt HTML and XHTML before learning ASP.NET. For ASP.NET, you just need to know the basics of HTML and XHTML.


• Know-how of basic database concepts (like relationships between entities, basic DML, DCL, and DDL queries) is optional and will be useful in future chapters where we will connect a database with our ASP.NET websites.


So, these were the basic software and skill requirements for this tutorial. Let’s begin with Chapter 1: Introduction to ASP.NET