It was estimated in June 2015 that 45 percent of the world's population has accessed the Internet. That's over 3 billion users, and the number is growing every day. This is a vast, connected market that can reach any content you decide to make available, be it a simple web page or a complex web application.
There are a lot of ways that you can make a simple web page available online. There are a lot fewer approaches when you are trying to build a web application. One of these web application technologies is ASP.NET from Microsoft.
ASP.NET is a framework that supports the building of robust and performant web applications. Think of it as the structural support for a car. You can add a couple of different body designs on top of this structure: ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. These two approaches both rest on ASP.NET and depend on common functionality that is made available through ASP.NET.
Visual Studio 2015 is the primary tool used when creating and maintaining ASP.NET web applications. It will help you easily work with every aspect of your web application, from the “look and feel” all the way through to deployment of your application—and skipping none of the steps in between. In addition, because Microsoft is committed to supporting ASP.NET developers, it is available in a fully functional free version!
This book is an exploration of both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC. As part of this exploration you will become familiar with all of the various components of a functional web application, creating a sample application as you go through the different parts of the development process. You will learn how the two frameworks do things, with some approaches being very similar while others are completely different. No matter the style of approach, however, it is always clear that they both rest on the same framework.
This book is designed for anyone who wants to build robust, performant, and scalable web applications. Although the development tools run in Microsoft Windows, you are free to deploy the application onto virtually any current operating system; therefore, even organizations that don't have Microsoft servers have the capability to now run ASP.NET web applications.
If you are new to software development you should have no problem following along, as the book has been structured with you in mind. Those of you who are experienced developers but new to web development will also find many different areas of interest and use, especially if C# is not your current programming language.
Lastly, experienced ASP.NET developers should also find many topics of interest, especially if your experience is mainly related to either Web Forms or MVC, but not both. This book will give you experience in both approaches as well as demonstrate how to integrate the two approaches into a single application.
This book teaches you how to build a fully functional web application. You will have the opportunity to build a complete site using both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms approaches so that you can develop an understanding of, and build a comfort level with, the complete ASP.NET set of functionality. Each chapter takes you a step further along the development process:
The primary instructional approach in this book is a set of detailed hands-on steps that walk you through the process of building a complete application. These “Try It Out” activities, which demonstrate whatever topic is under discussion, are followed by a “How It Works” section that explains what each step accomplishes. Each of the “Try It Out” sections builds on what was done previously, so they should be followed sequentially.
Exercise questions at the end of the chapter enable you to test your understanding of the material, and answers are available in the appendix. Some questions are specific, others more general. Together they are designed to help reinforce the information presented in the chapter.
A lot of information is presented in this book; it covers two technological approaches that sometimes seem completely different. Additional sources of information are included in the chapters if you want more detailed information about a particular approach or product.
In order to follow along with the chapter and its hands-on activities, you will need the following:
To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.
As for styles in the text:
persistence.properties
.We present code in two different ways:
We use a monofont type with no highlighting for most code examples.
We use bold to emphasize code that's particularly important in the present context.
As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually or to use the source code files that accompany the book. All the source code used in this book is available for download at http://www.wrox.com/go/beginningaspnetforvisualstudio. You will find the code snippets from the source code are accompanied by a download icon and note indicating the name of the program so you know it's available for download and can easily locate it in the download file. Once at the site, simply locate the book's title (either by using the Search box or by using one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book.
After downloading the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternately, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at http://www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.
We make every effort to ensure that there are no errors in the text or in the code. However, no one is perfect, and mistakes do occur. If you find an error in one of our books, such as a spelling mistake or a faulty piece of code, we would be very grateful for your feedback. By sending in errata you may save another reader hours of frustration, and at the same time you will be helping us provide even higher quality information.
To find the errata page for this book, go to http://www.wrox.com and locate the title using the Search box or one of the title lists. Then, on the book details page, click the Book Errata link. On this page you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors. A complete book list, including links to each book's errata, is also available at www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml.
If you don't spot “your” error on the Book Errata page, go to www.wrox.com/contact/techsupport.shtml and complete the form there to send us the error you have found. We'll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book's errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book.
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At http://p2p.wrox.com you will find a number of different forums that will help you not only as you read this book, but also as you develop your own applications. To join the forums, just follow these steps:
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