Introduction to ASP.NET Knowledge Base Pankaj Kumar Singh pankajsingh192005@gmail.com 1 Sept 2009 ASP .NET Tutorial Series ASP.NET is a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. Need for Server-Side Scripting For all the newbie’s out there the term Server side scripting might sound like technical jargon but actually the whole idea gets pretty simple if you understand the basics. So let us begin. Most of us who have internet access must have visited websites. All the content that you see in a website is described or simply created through HTML which stands for Hyper Text Markup language. Now since you guys are reading this article it must mean that you have basic (or greater) knowledge about programming. HTML helps in defining the look and feel of the content that you are presented with. And so to describe it in technical way you can say that it handles the Presentation logic which simply means that it handles how the data is presented to you. What does that have to do with ASP.Net???? It means that HTML does not concern itself with how data is processed, only how it is displayed. So now server side scripting (scripting means programming) steps in now. That is your HTML form collects all the data that is required and submits it to a place where it can be processed. The web today commonly follows a Three Tier Architecture. The picture below will explain the above point clearly. Say you wish to login in your email account. 001_img1.gif So you see that all the processing is done by the Server side scripts whether it is sending you the page when you first type the website address in the address bar of your browser, checking whether you entered a valid user id and password and sending you the output. There are many server side scripting languages available and the most popular among them are ASP.net from Microsoft, JSP and servelets in the J2EE framework from Sun Microsystems and PHP which is open source Tools of the Trade ASP stands for Active Server Pages. ASP pages have an extension .aspx and ASP.net is one of the most widely used languages on the web beside PHP. To work with asp.net to create your own website you will need a software package from Microsoft Visual Studio. MS Visual studio provides an environment where you can easily create your website and test them. As of writing this article this latest version is Visual Studio 2008 which is based on .Net framework 3.5. For a quick introduction to what is the .Net framework we can say that it is a collection of classes and technologies that have been developed by Microsoft with an attempt to increase interoperability between different languages of the framework. It makes code easy to reuse and develop robust (think solid) and distributed applications. Visual Studio 2005 which targets the .net framework 2.0 is still the most widely used version of Visual Studio, but slowly and steadily everyone is moving towards .Net 3.5 and VS 2008. For the purpose of this tutorial let us assume that you have Visual Studio 2008 installed at your machine. However the things mentioned here also apply to VS 2005. ASP.Net: Let’s begin Fire up visual studio and you will be greeted with a start page. 1.Click on File -> New Website. In the dialogue box that opens you see a list of available Visual studio default templates. Templates can be thought of prebuilt blueprints of a website. 2.Select ASP.Net Website 3.Above .Net Framework 3.5 is selected by default. Visual Studio 2008 allows you to work on different frameworks from one environment. Thus to work with .net 2.0 you don’t need to install VS 2005 separately. Depending on the framework you will get different templates. 4.Below Location says File System which means that the website will be created on your hard drive, which is great because you can test your website without internet access. However you can create a website directly on an internet site by selecting HTTP and providing a valid internet address, same goes for FTP. For now let us select File System. 5.Provide a path for your website…..simple enough 6.Select a language….any….which you are conversant in. 7.Click OK To be continued ...