by Wellington Perera

ASP.NET - Part I - Geting Started...By Wellington Perera

If you look around the software development arena today, everybody wants to get into web development. Actually this trend started couple of years ago. Compared to the client application development there are many advantages in developing web applications to both the development house and to the end user. Among them faster development cycle, convenience in deploying, ability to reach a larger audience easily, convenience in doing updates etc are the most prominent.

Well! Folks … this is the first one of a series of articles which will help you to get started and continue with developing web applications using ASP.NET. In this article we are going to look at setting up the environment to start developing with ASP.NET.

You need two key software pieces to start, those are Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Most university students in the country already have access to the professional grade versions of Visual Studio through the MSDN Academic Alliance and the .NET Framework is absolutely free. All the school students in the country will have access to these tools through DreamSpark (http://www.dreamspark.com) very soon. If you are not a university students or a school student you don’t have to worry. You can start development with the Visual Studio Express Editions which is the free edition. Just visit http://www.asp.net/downloads/essential/ to download the latest versions of the framework as well as the development tool. Since we are going to focus on developing web applications in this you have to download Visual Web Developer Express. This tool support both VB.NET and C#. However you should remember both VB.NET and C# are equally capable languages. There are some rumors in the industry that C# is more powerful than VB.NET which has no truth at all.

To get started install Visual Web Developer from the above URL.

Creating your first web site …

Creating a website is not a complicated task. Actually Visual Studio has simplified the whole process. If you have being a web developer about 7-8 year ago in the classic ASP era or if you are a web developer with any other web development technology you’ll find this as a quite complicated process. There are several things that you had to consider. Among them having a web server installed and configured with necessary access rights was a key things and for most of us this made the development experience an unpleasant one. But when you are using Visual Studio you don’t have worry about those. It’s just a simple process, just like installing any other application.

Once you have the Visual Web Developer Express Edition installed you are good to go. Open the Visual Web Developer from the start menu programs.

Your development environment will look like the following when the website is created.

Hit F5 to run your website. It will open your default web browser and execute the site. During this execution you will notice a new taskbar icon which is the instance of the Casini web server. Casini is a personal web server built into the development environment to facilitate ASP.NET application development. This way you don't have to have a web server configured separately.

Visual Studio / Visual Web Developer

We'll be having an in-depth look at Visual Studio / Visual Web Developer in a future article. Till then just click around to get yourself familiarize with the environment. For the time being take a note of your Toolbox, Properties Window, Solution Explorer and the Code/Preview area. We'll go into details about each of these sections later. Just remember Solution Explorer displays all the files in to your project, Properties window displays properties and events of a selected object from the code/preview area and the toolbox displays the components that you can drag and drop on to the web page.

Try the following ...

• Drag and drop a Button and a TextBox from the toolbox to the web page. Select the button and see the different properties in the Properties window. Then select the TextBox and see the property window changing.
• Try changing couple of Properties such as FontSize, Backcolor, ForeColor, Text etc and see the look and feel of the Button and the TextBox changing.
• Click the Split button at the bottom of the screen and see both preview and HTML code changing when you change properties the property window.
• try changing some property values by typing on the HTML view. Notice theIntelliSensewhen typing HTML.
• Double click the button to go to the Code Behind of the page. type the highlighted code inside the Button_Click Event. Run your project and click the button and see what happens.

  protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
      TextBox1.Text = "i'm learning ASP.NET. Woo! Hoo!";
  }}

• Right-click on the project name on your Solution Explorer and go to 'Add New Item'. Try adding couple of different items form the  window appear. (e.g. Master Pages, Web User Controls, Style Sheets etc)
• Right-click on the project name on your Solution Explorer and go to 'Property Pages' and see what are the project properties available.
• Go to the Options menu under Tools menu and see what are the different options available to control the development environment.