With free versions of Microsoft Visual Web Developer and Microsoft SQL Server 2005, it has never been easier to get started. This book shows you how.
VB or C#?
Microsoft’s website technology continues to get more complex. It used to be that creating a web site was as easy as putting an html file on a web server. But that was ten years ago and since then Microsoft has introduced Active Server Pages (ASP) with interpreted VBScript, (a Visual Basic derivative) then ASP.NET using C# and VB.NET and now ASP.NET 2.0 which speeds things up by compiling web pages.- Unsure about the Difference between Compiled and Interpreted?
Christian Darie and Zak Ruvalcaba wrote the first edition of this book three years ago for ASP.NET and have released a 2nd edition to go with ASP.NET 2.0. This is quite meaty at 650 pages long.
Getting Started
Installing a web server can be a trying task. The first 30 pages are devoted to this task with both the full blown Microsoft IIS Web Server and the lighter Cassini which is for anyone with the Home Edition of Windows XP. After the software has been installed, the book shows where to put web pages and how to configure both IIS and SQL Server 2005 Express.The next chapter is a brief intro to html and ASP.NET web pages written with C# or VB.NET and gets down to the basics of creating web pages. This is targeted at novice web developers though anyone with a little programming experience will pick it up quickly.
Chapter three is a quick into to programming from the point of view of web pages. It’s not a comprehensive intro (in C# or VB.NET) and other books will do that better, but it provides a fairly brisk introduction moving from variables through arrays to functions in a few pages. Concepts like collections are used (in for each loops) before explaining what a collection actually is. It’s a bit of a mad pace but the examples are clear. This is definitely a book to work through rather than just read. Part of me wonders if instead of having one book for C# and VB./NET, the publisher could have produced two books one on each language with a little bit more for beginners or a touch more detail.
Moving on, the next chapter is solid nuts and bolts and looks at the basic and advanced controls as well as master pages and even using CSS. At nearly 50 pages long this covers a lot of detail.
Getting Practical
In chapter five, the emphasis is on practicality- building a working website using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and testing it with both the built in web server and IIS. This is a practical chapter and covers Applications and Sessions and the use of Cookies. The use of skins, themes and master pages s demonstrated – these are important time saving concepts and with the addition of debugging, viewing error pages and exception handling brings this chapter to a not inconsiderable 64 pages.To minimize reinventing the wheel when it comes to form validation, ASP.NET provides easy cross browser methods of validating on the clinet (if JavaScript is enabled) and on the server. Chapter six is all about validation and covers all of the controls as well as regular expressions for the RegularExpressionValidator
The real meat in dynamic website development is using databases and chapter seven goes into considerable depth on this- prior knowledge of databases is not required. This segues naturally into SQL in chapter eight and ADo.NET (the .NET database technology) in chapter nine.
Onto ADO.NET
Uisng the advanced conttrols is the subject of the next three chapters culminating in the use of ADO.NET data sets to drive the controls. These features are what really differentiates ASP.NET 2 from other web server technologies and demonstrate how Microsoft's tools simplify the tasks. Editing live data (from a datbase) in grids is shown with relatively little code needed.It would be unlucky if your website got hacked and the appropriately numbered chapter thirteen goes into a lot of depth on security, authentication and authorization, as well as the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool. Microsoft provides Login controls and these are covered as well. As always there is plenty of code and explanations.
We're now into the last hundred pages of the book and it's concentrating on the important but less glamorous tasks such as working with files and folders, reading and writing text files and sending email. A sample company newsletter is created and sent via email. That completes the main part of the book and it's followed by a references on the provided web controls.
Conclusion
This is a very well written book and an excellent overview and introduction to developing websites in C#/VB.NET on ASP.NET 2.0. It's not a bad book for beginners though you will need other texts to expand on the detail. Experienced web developers used to other technologies will find it a very useful "leg up" the learning curve. Recommended.
