Introduction

The major benefit you will derive from reading this book is that you will be led, step by step, through the creation of a real-world–style business Web application that takes advantage of many of the new capabilities provided by the .NET platform. After reading this book, you will be able to program .NET applications using ADO.NET, Web Forms, and Web Services. Most of the books on the market do not address a real-world application, and most do not ever use a step-by-step approach. This book uses this approach so you can learn what you need in order to get your job done quicker and more efficiently. This will make your investment in this book pay off right from the beginning chapters.

What Is the Purpose of This Book?

The purpose of this book is to show you how to use ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET to build real-world business applications on the Web. We will show the practical applications of ASP.NET by illustrating how to build a client/server application using Web Forms and Web Services. Emphasis will be on good programming standards and practices. You will be taken from an introduction of the Visual Basic .NET language to intermediate topics through a step-by-step approach. This lets you try out the practices being set forth in this book.

What This Book Isn't

Given the challenge of writing about a huge technology like Microsoft's .NET platform, we made specific decisions about what and what not to cover. With that in mind, this book is most definitely not a reference manual, and it is not a rehash of the Microsoft documentation. It is, however, a great place to start digging into the features and power of ASP.NET. The book is also not a resource on advanced features—you'll find many other books that explain the things you'll want to dig into after you've learned the basics. We deliberately avoided topics that you don't need to know right away. Instead, we focused on topics you'll need right away to begin your exploration of ASP.NET and Web development using the .NET platform.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is designed for anyone who wants to learn how to create a business application using ASP.NET, HTML, and Internet Information Services (IIS). Throughout this book, you will be introduced to the concepts of the Microsoft .NET Framework, how to create a Web application using SQL Server, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Web Services, as well as good programming principles.

Prerequisites

This book is designed for programmers who need to know how to program a Web application. If you are a programmer and/or Web designer who has some experience with VBScript or ColdFusion, you will get a lot out of this book. Even if you're not, there is enough in here to get you started. To get the most out of this book, it is recommended that you have experience using a programming language such as Visual Basic 6.0. Some experience with Visual Basic .NET would be helpful, but it's not required. You should also be familiar with relational database concepts and have access to the Northwind sample database that comes with SQL Server and Access. You must be familiar with Windows 2000, or later, and have access to Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP to effectively use this book. Familiarity with IIS is also recommended, because this book will assume you know how to set up virtual directories in IIS.

Assumptions

You will need several tools at your disposal so you can try out the many exercises contained in this book. Here is a list of the tools you should have on your computer:

• Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or later or Microsoft Access

• The Northwind sample database, which comes with SQL Server and Access

• Microsoft Windows 2000, or XP

• Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) Framework SDK

• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

• Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit (optional)

Getting and Running .NET

The .NET Framework and the Visual Studio .NET IDE can both be purchased from many vendors, including directly from Microsoft. Although the .NET Framework will run on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 second edition, and Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), you'll need to have Windows NT with Service Pack 6, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows .NET Server in order to develop applications. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later is required. For server-side installs, Microsoft Data Access Components 2.7 is required. You need at least a PII 450MHz processor with a minimum of 128MB of RAM and at least 800×600 resolution.

You will find that you need at least a PIII 650MHz processor with 384MB of RAM or better to be really productive. The more memory you have, the better off you will be. Given the choice, adding memory should have a higher priority than upgrading your processor.

Making the Most of This Book

To download the examples discussed in this book, and to find updates and fixes, visit our Web site, www.pdsa.com/aspnetjumpstart Because this book focuses on building an application that looks and feels like a simple business-oriented Web site, you'll get the flavor of the types of issues that will affect every ASP.NET developer. Rather than focusing on features or technology, we've focused on tasks and solutions. Although there may be other ways to accomplish some of the techniques we've proposed in this book, given the examples shown here, you'll have a running head start toward building your own sites and applications.

We suggest that you work your way through this book, from start to finish. There may be some chapters along the way that cover material you're already familiar with (for example, the chapters on HTML and XML). In that case, skim on past. Don't worry about missing out on steps in building the sample application—we've included, along with the sample application, a finished version of the application after each chapter. If you skip a chapter, you can simply copy the contents of the finished version for the chapter into your working folder. (See Chapter 1, “Getting Started with the Sample Application,” for more details.) In a perfect world, after working through the examples in each chapter, you would take the time to review the documentation on the objects and techniques covered and then add your own functionality to the application.