Chapter 1: Getting Started With ASP.NET 3.5

Applies to: Visual Studio 2010

Provided by: Imar Spaanjaars

Buy This Book from Publisher

This topic contains the following sections.

• What You Will Learn in This Chapter
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer
• Creating Your First ASP.NET 3.5 Web Site
• An Introduction to ASP.NET 3.5
• A Tour of the IDE
• Customizing the IDE
• The Sample Application
• Practical Tips on Visual Web Developer
• Summary
• Exercises
• Copyright

What You Will Learn in This Chapter

Ever since the first release of the .NET Framework 1.0 in early 2002, Microsoft has put a lot of effort and development time into ASP.NET, the part of the .NET Framework that enables you to build rich web applications. This first release meant a radical change from the older Microsoft technology to build web sites called Active Server Pages (ASP), now often referred to as classic ASP. The introduction of ASP.NET 1.0 and the associated Visual Studio .NET 2002 gave developers the following benefits over classic ASP:

• A clean separation between presentation and code. With classic ASP, your coding logic was often scattered throughout the HTML of the page, making it hard to make changes to the page later.

• A development model that was much closer to the way desktop applications are programmed. This made it easier for the many Visual Basic desktop programmers to make the switch to web applications.

• A feature-rich development tool (called Visual Studio .NET) that allowed developers to create and code their web applications visually.

• A choice between a number of object-oriented programming languages, of which Visual Basic .NET and C# (pronounced as C-Sharp) are now the most popular.

• Access to the entire .NET Framework, which for the first time meant that web developers had a unified and easy way to access many advanced features to work with databases, files, e-mail, networking tools, and much more.

Despite the many advantages of ASP.NET over the older model, using ASP.NET also meant an increase of complexity and the knowledge you needed to build applications with it, making it harder for many new programmers to get started with ASP.NET.

After the initial release in 2002, Microsoft released another version of the .NET Framework (called .NET 1.1) and the development IDE Visual Studio .NET in 2003. Many people saw this as a service pack for the initial release, although it also brought a lot of new enhancements in both the framework and the development tools.

In November 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 were released. To the pleasant surprise of many developers around the world, Microsoft had again been able to drastically improve and expand the product, adding many features and tools that helped reduce the complexity that was introduced with ASP.NET 1.0. New wizards and smart controls made it possible to reduce the code required to build an application, decreasing the learning curve for new developers and increasing the productivity.

The current version, ASP.NET 3.5, builds on top of the successful ASP.NET 2.0 release, leaving many of the beloved features in place, while adding new features and tools in other areas.

Over the next 18 chapters, you learn how to build full-featured ASP.NET web sites using Visual Web Developer, Microsoft’s development tool for ASP.NET web applications. This book guides you through the process of creating a fully functional, database-driven web, starting with a bare bones web site in this chapter, all the way down to the deployment of it to a production environment in Chapter 18.

To start off, this chapter gives you a good look at:

• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition and Visual Studio 2008 and how to acquire and install them.

• Creating your first web site with Visual Web Developer.

• The way an ASP.NET page is processed and sent to the browser.

• How you can use and customize the development environment.

The chapter closes with an overview of the sample web site that comes with this book, the Planet Wrox web site. In this chapter, you’ll see what the site has to offer and how to use it; the remainder of this book then shows you the inner workings of the site and how it’s built.

The sample site and all the examples in this book are built with Visual Web Developer (VWD), so it’s important that you have it installed on your development machine, and know how to access its most basic features. The next section shows you how to acquire and install VWD. Once you have it up and running, you’ll see how to create your first web site, followed by an extensive tour through the many features of VWD.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer

Although you could theoretically write ASP.NET web applications with Notepad or another text editor alone, you really want to install a copy of Microsoft Visual Web Developer. VWD is developed specifically for building ASP.NET web sites, and as such, hosts an enormous amount of tools that will help you in rapidly creating complex ASP.NET web applications.

Visual Web Developer comes in two flavors: as a standalone and free version called Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, and as part of the larger development suite called Visual Studio 2008, which is also available in different editions, each with its own price tag. Although the Express Edition of VWD is free, it contains all the features and tools you need to create complex and feature-rich web applications. All the examples you find in the book can be built with the free Express Edition so there’s no need to shell out big bucks for the commercial versions of Visual Studio 2008 to follow along with this book.

Getting VWD is easy. You can download it from the Microsoft site as discussed next.

Getting Visual Web Developer

You can get the free version of VWD from the Microsoft site at www.microsoft.com/express/. On the Express home page, follow the Download Now link until you reach the page that offers the downloads for the Express products, including Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. From this page, you can download Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition as a Web Install, where you download only the installer, while the remaining files are downloaded during the installation process. Make sure you choose Visual Web Developer from the page, and not one of the other free Express products. The page also allows you to download all Express products conveniently as an ISO image that you can burn onto a DVD.

Don’t be fooled by the file size of the Web Install download, which is little under 3MB. The file you downloaded is just the installer that downloads the required files over the Internet. The total download is around 1.3GB.

If you want to try out the full version of Visual Studio 2008, which also contains VWD, you can sign up for a free 90-day trial that you can get from the Microsoft site at https://msdn2.microsoft.com/vstudio. You can choose to download an ISO image that you’ll need to burn on a DVD.

Installing Visual Web Developer Express Edition

Installing Visual Web Developer is a straightforward, although somewhat lengthy, process. Depending on your installation method, your computer and your Internet connection speed, installing VWD may take up to several hours.

Try it Out: Installing Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

This Try it Out exercise guides you through installing VWD Express Edition on your computer. It assumes you’re using the web download option, although the process for installing the Express edition from a DVD is almost identical. The steps you need to perform to install the full versions of Visual Studio 2008 are similar as well, although the screens you’ll see will be somewhat different.

No matter which version of VWD you install, it’s important that you also install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition—a required component if you want to follow along with many of this book’s examples. When you install the full version of Visual Studio 2008, the option to install SQL Server is included on the list with features to install that you see during setup. If you install VWD Express Edition, you get the option to choose SQL Server on the Installer Options dialog box. If you don’t see SQL Server listed on these dialog boxes, you probably already have SQL Server 2005 Express Edition installed.

1. When you’re installing the web version, run the file you downloaded from the Microsoft web site. Otherwise, start the setup process from the Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer DVD.

2. Once the installer has started, click Next, read and accept the license terms, and click Next once more.

3. On the Installer Options page, make sure you select both the MSDN Express Library for Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Although these two options add considerably to the size of the download, both of them are invaluable for building ASP.NET web applications. If you don’t see the SQL Server option, you already have it installed. The Microsoft Silverlight Runtime component is optional, although it’s probably a good idea to download it now because you’ll see more and more web sites using Silverlight in the near future. Click Next again.

4. On the Destination Folder page, you can leave the Install in folder field set to its default if you have enough space on your primary disk. Otherwise, click the Browse button and select a different location.

5. Click the Install button. If you’re using the web-based installer, the setup application will first download the files over the Internet to your computer. During the installation process, you’ll see a screen (similar to Figure 1-1) that shows you the progress of the download and installation of VWD.

6. Once the application is finished installing, you may get a dialog box asking to reboot your machine. Click Restart now. Once your machine has started again, VWD is ready for use.

Figure 1-1

How it Works

The straightforward installation process guided you through the setup of VWD Express Edition. In the Installer Options dialog box, you selected the MSDN Library—which contains the help files for VWD—and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, Microsoft’s free version of its database engine. SQL Server 2005 is discussed and used a lot in this book, starting with Chapter 11. Appendix B shows you how to configure security settings for the various versions of SQL Server 2005 using the free SQL Server Management Studio Express Edition.

Now that VWD is installed, it’s time to fire it up and start working with it. The next section shows you how to create your very first site in VWD. You see how to create a site, add content to a web page, and view that page in your browser.

Creating Your First ASP.NET 3.5 Web Site

You probably can’t wait to get started with your first ASP.NET web site, so instead of giving you a theoretical overview of web sites in VWD, the next Try It Out exercise dives right into the action and shows you how to build your first web project. Then, in the How It Works explanation and the section that follows, you get a good look of what goes on behind the scenes when you view an ASP.NET page in your browser.

Try it Out: Creating Your First ASP.NET Web Page

1. Start VWD from the Windows Start menu if you haven’t done so already. The first time you start VWD, there is a long delay before you can use VWD because it’s busy configuring itself. Subsequent starts of the application will go much faster.

2. If you’re using a commercial version of Visual Studio, you also get a dialog box that lets you choose between different collections of settings the first time you start Visual Studio. The choice you make on that dialog box influences the layout of windows, toolboxes, menus, and shortcuts. Choose Web Development Settings because those settings are designed specifically for ASP.NET developers. You can always choose a different profile later by resetting your settings, as explained later in this chapter.

3. If you’re using a commercial version of Visual Studio, you also get a dialog box that lets you choose between different collections of settings the first time you start Visual Studio. The choice you make on that dialog box influences the layout of windows, toolboxes, menus, and shortcuts. Choose Web Development Settings because those settings are designed specifically for ASP.NET developers. You can always choose a different profile later by resetting your settings, as explained later in this chapter.

4. Once VWD is fully configured, you see the main screen appear, as shown in Figure 1-2.

   

5. You get a full description of all the windows, toolbars, panels, and menus in the next section, so for now, just focus on creating a new web site. Click the File menu in the upper-left corner and choose New Web Site. If you’re using a commercial version of Visual Studio, you may have to open the submenu New first. (Make sure you don’t accidentally use the New Project menu, as that is used to create different types of .NET applications.) The New Web Site dialog box appears as shown in Figure 1-3

   Figure 1-3

   

6. In the Templates section of the dialog box, verify that ASP.NET Web Site is selected. Also verify that File System is the selected option in the Location drop-down list. If you want, you could change the location on disk where the web site is stored by clicking the Browse button and choosing a new location on your computer’s hard drive. For now, the default location—a folder under your Documents folder—is fine, so you can leave the location as is.

7. In the Language drop-down list, you can choose a programming language you will use mainly in your site. This book shows all examples in both Visual Basic and C# so you can choose a language to your liking.

8. Click OK. VWD creates a new web site for you that includes one standard ASP.NET page called Default.aspx, a web.config file, and an empty App_Data folder, as shown in Figure 1-4. It also opens the file Default.aspx so you can see the code for the page.

   Figure 1-4

   

9. Between the opening and closing <div> tags in the page, type the highlighted text and code:

   <div>
     <h1>Hello World</h1>
     <p>Welcome to Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 on <%= DateTime.Now.ToString() %></p>
   </div>
   

10. You’ll see code formatted like this a lot more in this book. When you are instructed to type in code formatted like this with mixed background colors, you only need to type in the highlighted code. The other code should already be present in the file.

11. When you see code like this in a discussion—for example, in a How it Works section—the highlighted code is the part you need to focus on, while the code with no background is less important.

12. Don’t worry about the code with the angle brackets (<>) in the welcome message; you’ll see how it works later in this book. Although this code may not look familiar to you now, you can probably guess what it does: it writes out today’s date and time.

13. From the Debug menu in VWD, choose Start Without Debugging (or press Ctrl+F5) to open the page in your default browser, as shown in Figure 1-5.

    Figure 1-5

14. If you don’t see the date and time in the page, or if you get an error, look again at the code in the welcome message. It starts with an angle bracket (<) followed by a percentage symbol and an equals sign. It closes with a single percentage sign and another angle bracket (>). Also, make sure you typed in the code exactly as shown here, including capitalization. This is especially true when you are using C#, as that language is case sensitive.

    If you get an Information bar warning about Intranet settings in Internet Explorer, click the bar and choose Enable Intranet Settings. If you want to learn more about the implications of these settings first, choose What are Intranet Settings from the popup menu.

15. Notice how a little icon with a screen tip appeared in the tray bar of Windows, visible in Figure 1-6. This icon belongs to the ASP.NET Development Server. This web server has been started by VWD automatically to serve the request for your page. You’ll learn more about how the web server is able to process your page later in this book.

    Figure 1-6

    

16. That’s it. You just created your very first ASP.NET 3.5 web site with VWD.

How it Works

Although the web page you created in the previous Try It Out is quite simple, the process that eventually results in the page being displayed in your browser isn’t so simple. All by itself, the ASP.NET page (also referred to as an ASPX page because of its extension) you created in the previous Try It Out can’t do much. It needs to be processed and served by a web server before your browser can display it. That’s why VWD automatically started up the built-in ASP.NET Development Server to handle the request for the page. Next, it started up your default web browser and directed it to the address of the web server, https://localhost:49168/WebSite1 in the Try It Out example, although the actual number in the address may change every time you start the web server as the number is randomly chosen by VWD.

It’s important to realize that the ASPX file you created in VWD is not the same as the one that eventually gets displayed by the browser.

When you create a page in VWD, you add markup to it. The markup in an ASPX page is a combination of plain text, HTML, code for ASP.NET server controls (which you’ll learn more about in this chapter and in Chapter 4), code written in Visual Basic.NET or C#, and more.

When you request an ASPX page in your browser, the web server processes the page, executes any code it finds in the file, and effectively transforms the ASP.NET markup into plain HTML that it then sends to the browser, where it is displayed. In the previous Try It Out, the resulting HTML causes the browser to display the current date and time. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the language that browsers use to display a web page. You learn how HTML looks and how to use it later in this chapter.

To see how the final HTML differs from the original ASPX page, open the source for the page in your browser. In most browsers, you can bring up the source window by right-clicking the page and choosing View Source. This brings up your default text editor, showing the HTML for the page.

If you already closed your browser after the previous Try It Out, press Ctrl+F5 in VWD to open the page again.

Most of the HTML you see in the text editor is similar to the original ASPX page. However, if you look at the line that displays the welcome message and the current date and time, you’ll notice a big difference. Instead of the code between the angle brackets and percentage signs, you now see the actual date and time:

      <h1>Hello World</h1>
      <p>Welcome to Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 on 11/1/2007 5:03:39 PM</p>
    </div>

When the web server processed the page, it looked up the current date and time from the local computer, and inserted it in the HTML that got sent to the browser.

In the following section, you’ll see how this works in much more detail.

An Introduction to ASP.NET 3.5

When you type a web address like www.wrox.com in your web browser and press Enter, the browser sends a request to the web server at that address. This is done through HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the protocol by which web browsers and web servers communicate. When you send the address, you send a request to the server. When the server is active and the request is valid, the server accepts the request, processes it, and then sends the response back to the client browser. The relationship between the request and response is shown in Figure 1-7.

For simple, static files, like HTML files or images, the web server simply reads in the file from its local hard drive and sends it to the browser. However, for dynamic files, such as ASPX pages, this is obviously not good enough. If the web server were to send the ASPX file directly to the browser as a text file, you wouldn’t have seen the current date and time in the browser, but instead you would have seen the actual code (<%= DateTime.Now.ToString() %>). So, instead of sending the file directly, the web server hands over the request to another piece of software that is able to process the page. This is done with a concept called Application Mapping or Handler Mapping, where an extension of a file (.aspx in this example) is mapped to an application that is capable of handling it. In the case of an .aspx page, the request is eventually handled and processed by the ASP.NET runtime, part of the Microsoft .NET Framework designed specifically to handle web requests.

Figure 1-7

During the processing of the page, three important areas can influence the way the page eventually ends up in the browser:

• Static text. Any static text, like HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code you place in a page, is sent to the browser directly. You learn more about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in this and subsequent chapters, including Chapter 3, which gives you a detailed look at CSS.

• ASP.NET server controls. These controls are placed in your ASPX page and when they are processed, they emit HTML that is inserted in the page. You’ll learn more about server controls after the discussion of HTML in this chapter, and Chapter 4 is devoted entirely to ASP.NET server controls.

• Programming code. You can embed code, like Visual Basic .NET or C#, directly in a page, as you saw in the previous Try It Out. In addition, you can place code in a separate code file, called a Code Behind file. This code can be executed by the runtime automatically, or based on a user’s action. Either way, execution of the code can greatly influence the way the page is displayed, by accessing databases, performing calculations, hiding or showing specific controls, and much more. Programming your ASP.NET web pages is discussed in great detail in Chapter 5.

Once the page is done processing, and all the HTML for the page has been collected, it is sent back to the browser. The browser then reads this HTML, parses it and, finally, displays the page for you to look at.

Since HTML is so critical for displaying web pages, the next section gives you an overview of HTML.

Understanding HTML

HTML is the de facto language for creating web pages and is understood by every web browser that exists today. Since the beginning of the ’90s it has been the driving force of the World Wide Web, the part of the Internet that deals with web pages. HTML documents are simple text files that contain markup, a combination of text, and additional data that influences that text.

HTML Elements

HTML uses angle brackets to indicate how your content should be rendered (or displayed) in the browser. The angle brackets are referred to as tags; a pair of tags holding some text is referred to as an element. Take another look at the HTML you saw in the previous Try It Out where you opened the source window for the page in the browser:

    <h1>Hello World</h1>
    <p>Welcome to Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 on 11/1/2007 5:03:39 PM</p>

The first line of this example contains an <h1> element with an opening tag (<h1>) and a closing tag (</h1>). This element is used to signify a heading at level one. Notice how the element is closed with a similar tag, but with an additional forward slash (/) in it: </h1>. Any text between these opening and closing tags is considered part of the element, and is thus rendered as a heading. In most browsers, this means the text is rendered in a larger font. Similar to the <h1> tag, there are tags for creating headings up to level six, such as <h2>, <h3>, and so on.

Below the heading element, you see a <p> element, which is used to denote a paragraph. All text within the pair of <p> tags is considered part of the paragraph. By default, a browser renders a paragraph with some additional margin spacing at the bottom, although you can override that behavior.

Many tags are available in HTML; too many to cover them all here. The following table lists some of the most important tags and describes how they can be used. For a complete list of all HTML elements, take a look at the web site of the organization that maintains HTML: www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/elements.html.

Tag	Description	Example
<html>	Used to denote the start and end of the entire page.	<head><title>
<head><title>	Used to denote a special section of the page that contains data about the page, including its title.	<head> <title>Welcome to my site</title></head>
<body>	Used to denote the start and end of the body of the page.	<body> Page body goes here</body>
<a>	Used to link one web page to another.	<a href="http://www.wrox.com">Visit the Wrox site</a>
<img>	Used to embed images in a page.	<img src="Logo.gif" />
<b><i><u>	Used to format text in a bold, italic, or underline font.	This is <b>bold text</b> while <i>this text is in italic</i>
<form><textarea><select><input>	Used for input forms that allow users of a web site to submit information to the server.	<input type="text" value="Some Text" />
<table><tr><td>	These tags are used to create a layout with a table. The <table> tag defines the entire table, while the <tr> and <td> are used to define rows and cells, respectively.	<table><tr> <td>This is a Cell in Column 1</td> <td>This is a Cell in Column 2</td></tr></table>
<ul><ol><li>	These three tags are used to create numbered or bulleted lists. The <ul> and the <ol> define the looks of the list (either unordered, with a simple bullet, or ordered, with a number), while the <li> is used to represent items in the list.	<ul> <li>First item with a bullet</li> <li>Second item with a bullet</li></ul><ol> <li>First item with a number</li> <li>Second item with a number</li></ol>
<span>	This tag is used to wrap and influence other parts of the document. It appears as inline, so it adds no additional line break to the page.	<p>This is some normal text while <span style="color: red;">this text appears in red</span></p>
<div>	Just like the <span> tag, the <div> is used as a container for other elements. However, the <div> acts as a block element, which causes an explicit line break after the <div> tag by default.	<div>This is some text on 1 line</div><div>This text is put directly under the previous text on a new line. </div>

HTML Attributes

In addition to the HTML elements, the previous table also shows you HTML attributes. Attributes contain additional information that changes the way a specific element behaves. For example, with the <img> tag that is used to display an image, the src attribute defines the source of that image. Similarly, the <span> tag contains a style attribute that changes the color of the text to red. The value of the style attribute (color: red;) is part of a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), which is discussed in much more detail in Chapter 3. Just as with the HTML elements, there is a long list of available attributes on the W3C web site: www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/attributes.html.

You don’t need to memorize all these elements and attributes. Most of the time, they are generated for you automatically by VWD. In other cases, where you need to enter them by hand, VWD has some great tools to help you find the right tag or attribute. This tool, called IntelliSense, is discussed later in the book.

The Difference Between HTML and XHTML

In addition to HTML, you may also run into the term XHTML. Although the two have very similar names, there are some interesting differences that you need to be aware of. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML—eXtensible Markup Language. This is a generic, text- and tag-based language used to describe data and is used as the base language for many other languages, including XHTML.

So, XHTML is in fact largely just HTML rewritten with XML rules. These rules are pretty simple, and most of the time VWD will help you get it right or show you a list of errors and suggestions on how to fix them.

Always Close Your Elements

In XHTML, all elements must be closed. So when you start a paragraph with <p>, you must use </p> somewhere later in your page to close the paragraph. This is also the case for tags that don’t have their own closing tags, like <img> or <br> (to enter a line break). In XHTML, these tags are written as self-closing tags, where the closing slash is embedded directly in the tag itself as in <img src="Logo.gif" /> or <br />.

Always Use Lower Case for Your Tag and Attribute Names

XML is case sensitive, and XHTML applies that rule by forcing you to write all your tags in lowercase. Although the tags and attributes must be in all lowercase, the actual value doesn’t have to be. So, the previous example that displays the logo image is perfectly valid XHTML, despite the uppercase L in the image name.

Always Enclose Attribute Values in Quotes

Whenever you write an attribute in a tag, make sure you wrap its value in quotes. For example, when writing out the <img> tag and the src attribute, write it like this:

<img src="Logo.gif" />

and not like this:

<img src=Logo.gif />

Note that you could also use single quotes to enclose the attribute value, as in this example:

<img src=’Logo.gif’ />

It’s also sometimes necessary to nest single and double quotes. When some special ASP.NET syntax requires the use of double quotes, you should use single quotes to wrap the attribute’s value:

<asp:Label ID="DescriptionLabel" runat="server" Text=’<%# Eval("Description") %>’ />

You’ll see this syntax used a lot more in other chapters in this book.

For consistency, this book uses double quotes where possible in all HTML that ends up in the client.

Nest Your Tags Correctly

When you write nested tags, make sure that you first close the inner tag you opened last, and then close the outer tag. Consider this correct example that formats a piece of text with both bold and italic fonts:

<b><i>This is some formatted text</i></b>

Notice how the <i> is closed before the <b> tag. Swapping the order of the closing tags leads to invalid XHTML:

<b><i>This is some formatted text</b></i>

Always Add a DOCTYPE Declaration to Your Page

A DOCTYPE gives the browser information about the kind of HTML it can expect. By default, VWD adds a DOCTYPE for XHTML 1.0 Transitional to your page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

The DOCTYPE greatly influences the way browsers like Internet Explorer render the page. VWD’s default DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Transitional gives you a good mix between valid markup and pages that render the same in all major browsers.

If you want to learn more about XHTML, get a copy of Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS, ISBN: 978-0-7645-7078-0.

Besides HTML, an ASP.NET web page can contain other markup as well. Most pages will have one or more ASP.NET Server Controls on the page to give it some added functionality. The next section briefly looks at these ASP.NET Server Controls, and you get an in-depth look at them in Chapter 4.

A First Look at ASP.NET Markup

To some extent, the markup for ASP.NET Server Controls is similar to that of HTML. It also has the notion of tags and attributes, using the same angle brackets and closing tags as HTML does. However, there are also some differences.

For starters, most of the ASP.NET tags start with an asp: prefix. For example, a button in ASP.NET looks like this:

<asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Button" />

Note how the tag is self-closed with the trailing slash (/) character, eliminating the need to type a separate closing tag.

Another thing you may have noticed is that the tag and attribute names are not necessarily in all lowercase. Because an ASP.NET Server Control lives on the server, it doesn’t have to adhere to the XHTML rules used in the browser at the client. However, when a server control is asked to emit its HTML to a page that is configured to output XHTML, it will do so in XHTML. So, the code for the same button looks like this when rendered in the browser as XHTML:

<input type="submit" name="Button1" value="Button" id="Button1" />

Notice how the entire tag and its attributes conform to the XHTML standard.

Now that you understand the basics of an ASP.NET page and the HTML that it generates, it’s time to look at VWD again. Knowing how to use the application and its many tools and windows is an important step in building fun, good-looking, and functional web sites.

A Tour of the IDE

VWD is by far the most extensive and feature-rich integrated development environment (IDE) for building ASP.NET web pages. The abbreviation IDE refers to the way all the separate tools you need to build complex web applications are integrated in a single environment. Instead of writing code in a text editor, compiling code at the command line, writing HTML and CSS in a separate application, and managing your database in yet another, VWD allows you to perform all of these tasks, and more, from the same environment. Besides the efficiency this brings because you don’t have to constantly switch tools, this also makes it much easier to learn new areas of VWD, as many of the built-in tools work in the same way.

The Main Development Area

To get familiar with the many tools that are packed in VWD’s interface, take a look at Figure 1-8. It shows the same screen you got after you created your first web site in VWD, but now it highlights some of the most important screen elements. If you had a previous version of Visual Studio installed, your screen may look different, as Visual Studio 2008 is able to import settings from older versions.

Figure 1-8

The Main Menu

At the top of the application, right below the Windows title bar, you see the main menu. This menu bar contains familiar items you find in many other Windows applications, like the File, Edit, and Help menus as well as menus that are specific to VWD, such as the Website and Debug menus. The menu changes dynamically depending on the task you’re working on, so you’ll see menu items appear and disappear as you work your way through the application.

The Toolbar Area

Right below the menu, you see the toolbar area that is capable of showing different toolbars that give you quick access to the most common functions in VWD. In Figure 1-8, only four of the toolbars are enabled, but VWD comes with many other toolbars that you can use in specific task-oriented scenarios. Some toolbars appear automatically when you’re working on a task that requires a particular toolbar’s presence, but you can also enable and disable toolbars to your liking. To enable or disable a toolbar, right-click an existing toolbar or the menu bar and choose the toolbar from the menu that appears.

The Toolbox

On the left of the main screen, tucked away at the border of VWD, you see the tab for the Toolbox. If you hover your mouse over the tab, the Toolbox folds out, giving you a chance to see what it contains. If you click the little pin icon in the upper-right corner of the Toolbox (or any of the other panels that have this pin icon), it gets pinned to the IDE so it remains open.

Just as with the menu bar and the toolbars, the Toolbox automatically updates itself to show content that is relevant to the task you’re working on. When you’re editing a standard ASPX page, the Toolbox shows the many controls you have available for your page. You can simply drag an item from the Toolbox and drop it on a location of your page where you want it to appear. These controls are discussed in great detail in Chapter 4.

The Toolbox contains multiple categories with tools that can be expanded and collapsed as you see fit to make it easier to find the right tool. You can also reorder the items in the list, add and remove items from the Toolbox, and even add your own tools to it. Customizing the IDE is discussed later in this chapter.

If the Toolbox is not visible on-screen, press Ctrl+Alt+X to open it or choose Toolbox from the View menu.

There are two additional tabs below the Toolbox tab: CSS Properties and Manage Styles. Both are discussed extensively in Chapter 3.

The Solution Explorer

At the right of the screen, you see the Solution Explorer. The Solution Explorer is an important window because it gives you an overview of the files that comprise your web site. Instead of placing all your files in one big folder, the Solution Explorer enables you to store files in separate folders, creating a logical and organized site structure. You can use the Solution Explorer to add new files to your site, move existing files around using drag and drop, delete files from the project, and more. Most of the functionality of the Solution Explorer is hidden behind its right-click menu, which changes depending on the item you right-clicked in the explorer window.

At the top of the Solution Explorer, you see a little toolbar that gives you quick access to some functionality related to your web site, including opening the Properties window for the selected item, refreshing the Solution Explorer window, an option to nest related files, and two buttons that allow you to copy and configure your web site. All of this functionality is discussed later in the book.

You can access the Solution Explorer by choosing View | Solution Explorer from the main menu or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+L.

The Database Explorer

This window, hidden behind the Solution Explorer in Figure 1-8, enables you to work with your databases. It gives you the tools to create new databases and open existing ones, add new tables and queries to your database, and access other tools that enable you to work with the data in your database. If you have a commercial version of Visual Studio, such as Visual Studio 2008 Professional, this window is called the Server Explorer and may be located at the left of your screen.

The Database Explorer is discussed in more detail in the chapters about databases, starting with Chapter 11.

The Properties Grid

With the Properties Grid, you can view and edit the properties of many items in Visual Studio, including files in the Solution Explorer, controls on a web page, properties of the page itself, and much more. The window constantly updates itself to reflect the selected item. You can quickly open the Properties Grid by pressing F4. This same shortcut can be used to force the Properties Grid to show the details of a selected item.

The Document Window

The Document Window is the main area in the middle of the application. This is where most of the action takes place. You can use the Document Window to work with many different document formats, including ASPX and HTML files, CSS and JavaScript files, code files for VB and C#, XML and text files, and even images. In addition, you can use the same window to manage databases, create copies of your site, and view the pages in your site in the built-in mini-browser, and much more.

At the bottom of the Document Window in Figure 1-9, you see three buttons called Design, Split, and Source. These buttons appear automatically when you’re working with a file that contains markup, such as ASPX and HTML pages. They allow you to open the Design View of a page (giving you an idea of how the page will look in the browser), its Markup View (the HTML and other markup), or both at the same time. How this works is explained in more detail in Chapter 2 but for now, it’s important to realize you can switch between Markup View and Design View by clicking the appropriate buttons. The Markup View is also often called the Source View or Code View window. However, in order to avoid confusion, this book uses the term Markup View exclusively.

The Document Window is a tabbed window by default, which means it can host multiple documents, each one distinguished by a tab with the file name at the top of the window. The right-click menu of each tab contains some useful shortcuts for working with the file, including saving and closing it and opening the file’s parent folder in Windows Explorer.

To switch between documents, you can press Ctrl+Tab or you can click the down arrow in the upper-right corner of the Document Window, as shown in Figure 1-9. Clicking the down arrow reveals a list of open documents so you can easily select one.

Figure 1-9

Another way to switch documents is to press Ctrl+Tab and then hold the Ctrl key down. On the window that pops ups, you can select a document you want to work with in the right hand column. You can then use the cursor keys to move up and down in the list with open documents and get a live preview of each document. This makes it super easy to select the correct file.

On the same dialog box, you see a list with all active tool windows. Clicking one of the windows in the list will show it on-screen, moving in front of other windows if necessary.

The Start Page

Whenever you start up VWD, the Start Page is loaded in the Document Window. With the Start Page, you can quickly create new web sites or open existing ones. The Start Page is also used to give you access to some common help topics and shows headlines from the Microsoft web site. The main part of the Start Page is used to display an RSS feed with information from the MSDN Visual Web Developer team.

To get a feel of how you can use all these windows, the following Try It Out shows you how to build a simple web page that contains a few ASP.NET Server Controls.

Try it Out: Designing Your First ASP.NET Web Page

This Try It Out exercise guides you through creating a new web site with a single page that contains a number of ASP.NET Server Controls. You’ll see how to use windows like the Start Page and the Solution Explorer, and how to use the Toolbox and the Properties Grid to add ASP.NET Server Controls to the page and change their looks.

1. Start VWD. If you don’t see the Start Page, choose View | Other Windows | Start Page from the main menu.

2. On the Start Page, click Web Site next to the Create label in the Recent Projects area. This triggers the New Web Site dialog box. If you don’t see the link to create a new web on the Start Page, choose File | New Web Site or File | New | Web Site from VWD’s main menu instead.

   Make sure that ASP.NET Web Site is selected and that File System is chosen in the Location drop-down list. Click OK to create the new site.

3. Next, right-click the new web site in the Solution Explorer. Make sure you click the uppermost element that says something like C:\..\WebSite2\. It’s the highlighted element in Figure 1-4. From the context menu that appears, choose Add New Item.

4. In the new window that appears, click Web Form and type ControlsDemo as the name. The ASPX extension is added for you automatically when you click the OK button. You can leave the other settings in the dialog box at their default settings. The page should open in Markup View, showing you the default HTML, like the <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> elements that Visual Web Developer adds there for you automatically when you create a new page.

5. Switch the page to Design View by clicking the Design button at the bottom of the Document Window.

6. If the Toolbox isn’t open yet, press Ctrl+Alt+X to open it or hover your mouse over the Toolbox tab to show it and then click the pin icon to make the Toolbox visible at all times. Drag a TextBox and a Button from the Toolbox into the dashed area in the Design View of the page. You should end up with a page that looks similar to Figure 1-10.

   Figure 1-10

   

7. Right-click the button in Design View and choose Properties. In the Properties Grid, locate the Text property under the Appearance category (shown in Figure 1-11) and change it from Button to Submit Information. As soon as you press Tab or click somewhere outside the Properties Grid, the Design View of the page is updated and shows the new text on the button.

   1-11

   

8. Press Ctrl+F5 to open the page in your default browser. Note that it’s not necessary to explicitly save the changes to your page (although it’s a good idea to do this often anyway using the shortcut Ctrl+S). As soon as you press Ctrl+F5 to run the page, VWD saves all changes to open documents automatically.

   If you don’t like this behavior, you can change it in Visual Web Developer’s Options dialog box, accessible from the Tools menu. Make sure that Show All Settings is checked, and then open the Projects and Solutions node and choose Build and Run. In the Before Building list, you can change the way VWD behaves when you open a page in your browser.

9. Type some text in the text box and then click the button. Note that after the page has reloaded, the text is still displayed in the text box. Other than that, not much has happened because you didn’t write any code for the button yet.

How it Works

When you dragged the Button and the TextBox from the Toolbox on the page in Design View, VWD added the corresponding code for you in Markup View automatically. Similarly, when you changed the Text property of the button in the Properties Grid, VWD automatically updated the markup for the control in Markup View. Instead of using the Properties Grid, you could also have typed the text directly between the quotation marks of the Text property in the code window.

After changing the Text property, your page should now look like this in Markup View:

<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Submit Information" />

When you press Ctrl+F5 to view the page in the browser, the web server receives the request, the page is processed by the ASP.NET runtime, and the resulting HTML for the page is sent to the browser.

Take a look at the resulting HTML for the page using the browser’s View Source command (rerun the page from VWD by pressing Ctrl+F5 if you already closed it). You should see code similar to this:

<input name="TextBox1" type="text" value="Hello World" id="TextBox1" />
<input type="submit" name="Button1" value="Submit Information" id="Button1" />

Just as with the earlier example, you can see that the resulting HTML is substantially different from the original ASPX markup.

After you type in some text and click the button, the same process is more or less repeated: the web server receives the request, the page is parsed, and the result gets sent back to the browser. When you click the button, you cause a postback to occur, where any information contained in the page—such as the text you typed in the text box—is sent back to the server. ASP.NET reacts to the postback by rendering the page again. However, this time it prepopulates controls, like the TextBox, with the values that were sent to the page. Postbacks are an important concept in ASP.NET, and you’ll see more about them in other chapters, including Chapters 4 and 9.

VWD hosts a lot more windows and tool panels than those you have seen so far. The next section briefly touches upon some of the windows you’ll most frequently use when building ASP.NET web pages. All of the windows mentioned are accessible from the main View menu in VWD.

Informational Windows

Besides the windows that are visible by default when you start VWD, there are many more windows available in VWD. You’ll see most of them in action in the remainder of this book, but some are worth highlighting now.

The Error List

The Error List, which is accessible from the View menu, gives you a list of the things that are currently somehow broken in your site, including incorrect markup in your ASPX or HTML files and programming errors in VB or C# files. This window can even show you errors in XML and CSS files. The error list shows its messages in three categories—Errors, Warnings, and Messages—that signify the severity of the problem. Figure 1-12 shows the error list for a page that has some problems with its CSS and XHTML.

1-12

The Output Window

When you try to build your site using the Build menu, the Output window tells you whether the build succeeded or not. If the build failed, the Output window will tell you why the build failed. In the commercial versions of Visual Studio, the Output window is used for other information as well, including the status of external plug-in programs. Building web sites is discussed later in this book, including Chapter 18, which deals with deployment of your web site.

The Bookmark Window

You can add a bookmark to many code files in the Document Window by pressing Ctrl+K twice. With this shortcut key you can drop a little breadcrumb in the margin of a code line that you can later pick up using the Bookmark window. This allows you to quickly move around your code, which is especially useful when your site begins to grow.

The Find Results Window

The Find and Replace features of VWD are invaluable tools when it comes to managing the content of your site. You will often need to replace some text in the current document or even in the entire site. Find in Files (Ctrl+Shift+F) and Replace in Files (Ctrl+Shift+H) both output their results in the Find Results window, as shown in Figure 1-13.

Figure 1-13

Because having several informational windows open at the same time may take up precious screen space, it’s often a good idea to dock them. This way, only one of them is visible at a time, while you still have quick access to the others. You learn how to customize the IDE, including the docking of windows, next.

Customizing the IDE

Although the standard setup of VWD and its tool windows is pretty useful, there’s a fair chance you want to customize the IDE to your likings. You may want to rearrange some of the windows to a location where they are easier to reach, or you may want to open additional windows you frequently use. VWD is fully customizable and allows you to tweak every little detail of the IDE. In the next section, you learn how to perform the most common customization tasks.

Rearranging Windows

To give each window the location it deserves, you can drag and drop them in the main IDE. Simply grab a window’s title bar or its bottom tab and drag it in the direction of the new location. Once you start dragging, you’ll see that VWD gives you visual cues as to where the window will end up (see Figure 1-14).

If you drag the window over one of the four square indicators at the sides of the indicator, VWD shows a preview of how the window will be docked next to an existing window. Once you drop it, the window will pop to its new location. If you drop the window on the square in the middle of the large indicator, the window will dock with that window, sharing the same screen space. Each window has its own tab, as can be seen with the windows at the bottom of Figure 1-14.

Figure 1-14

In addition to docking windows with others in the IDE, you can also have floating windows. To change a docked window into a floating one, either drag it away from its current location and drop it somewhere in the IDE without hitting one of the visual cues on the screen or choose Window | Floating from the main menu.

To restore a floating panel to its previous docked location, choose Window | Dockable from the main menu and then double-click its title bar.

Modifying the Toolbox

The Toolbox can be modified as well. You can reorder the items alphabetically, making them easier to find in the list. To do this, open the Toolbox (press Ctrl+Alt+X), right-click one of the items in a category (such as the TextBox under the Standard category), and choose Sort Items Alphabetically. You can also delete items from the Toolbox by right-clicking them and then choosing Delete from the context menu. Don’t worry about items getting lost forever; you can reset the Toolbox again by choosing Reset Toolbox from the same menu.

You can also add your own items to the Toolbox. The most common use for this is code snippets. Simply highlight some text or code in the Document Window and drag it to the Toolbox. You can then right-click the item and choose Rename Item to give it a more meaningful name that you can easily recognize.

To avoid cluttering up the Toolbox with your own code snippets, consider creating a separate category for them. You can do this by choosing Add Tab from the Toolbox’s right-click menu. Enter a name and then press Enter, and your Toolbox tab is ready for use.

In the next Try It Out exercise, you get the chance to play around with the VWD IDE so you can customize it to your liking.

Try it Out: Customizing the IDE

In this exercise you’ll practice with opening and rearranging the windows in the Visual Web Developer IDE. You’ll also order the items in the Standard category of the Toolbox alphabetically so the controls are easier to find. Don’t be afraid to mess up the IDE. A little later in this chapter, there are instructions on how to reset the IDE to the way it was when you opened it the first time.

1. If you closed your web site since the previous Try It Out, open it again, or create a new one using the Start Page or the File menu.

2. From the View menu, choose Error List to open the Error List window. Notice how it gets docked below the Document Window by default.

3. From the same View menu, choose Task List. By default, it will be docked in the same space as the Error List, with the tabs for both windows next to each other.

4. Click the tab of the Task List and while holding down your mouse button, drag the Task List away from its location in the direction of the Document Window. Once you release the window, it will appear as a floating window in the IDE. To restore the window, double-click its title bar. Notice how the tab returns to the same tab group, but possibly at a different position. To change the order in which tabs appear in a tab group, drag a tab over the other tabs and release it at the desired location.

5. If you want, you can repeat the previous steps for other windows that are visible in the IDE by default or for the ones you find under the View menu. Spend some time familiarizing yourself with all the different windows and how you can arrange them on-screen. Since you’ll be working a lot with these windows in the remainder of this book, it’s good to be familiar with their locations.

6. Next, open the Default.aspx page from the Solution Explorer by double-clicking it. When the page opens, the Toolbox should become visible automatically. If it doesn’t, press Ctrl+Alt+X to open it.

7. The Standard category should be expanded by default, but if it isn’t, click the plus symbol in the left margin of the Toolbox. Next, right-click somewhere on a control in the Standard category and choose Sort Items Alphabetically. This puts the controls in alphabetical order in the Standard category only. If you want, you can repeat this step for other categories of the Toolbox.

8. Right-click the Toolbox again and choose Add Tab. Type HTML Fragments as its new name and press Enter. This adds a new category to the Toolbox that behaves just like all the others.

9. With the Document Window showing the page Default.aspx in Markup View, type <h1> between the opening and closing <div> tag. Note that VWD automatically inserts the closing <h1> for you. You should end up with the code window looking like this:

<div>
<h1></h1>
</div>

1. Highlight the opening and closing <h1> tags, and then drag the selection from the Markup View window onto the new Toolbox tab you created in step 8. The selection shows up as Text: <h1></h1>.

2. Right-click the Toolbox item you just created, choose Rename Item, and type Heading 1 as the name.

3. Repeat steps 9 through 11, creating headings from h2 through h6.

From now on, whenever you need a heading in your document in Markup View, simply place the cursor in the Document Window where you want the heading to appear and then double-click the appropriate heading in the Toolbox.

Tip

Most of the steps in this Try It Out are self-explanatory. You started off by opening a few windows that you frequently need when building web applications. You then used the drag-and-drop features of the IDE to rearrange the window layout to your personal preferences. You also rearranged the items in the Toolbox so they are easier to find.

You closed the exercise by adding a few HTML fragments to a custom tab in the Toolbox. When you drag any markup to the Toolbox, VWD creates a Toolbox item for it that contains the selected markup. Whenever you need a copy of that markup in your page, simply double-click the item or drag it from the Toolbox into the Markup View window. This is a great time saver for HTML fragments that you frequently use.

Besides the Window layout and the Toolbox, VWD allows you to customize a lot more in the IDE. The following section explains how to customize three other important IDE features: the Document Window, toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts.

Customizing the Document Window

Visual Web Developer gives you great flexibility with regard to how text is displayed in the Document Window. You can change things like font size, font color, and even the background color of the text. You can access the Font and Colors settings by choosing Tools | Options, making sure that Show All Settings at the bottom of the dialog box is selected, and then choosing Environment | Fonts and Colors.

One thing I like to customize in the Document Window is the tab size, which controls the number of spaces that are inserted when indenting code. To change the tab size, choose Tools | Options, and then under Text Editor choose All Languages | Tabs. If you don’t see this option, choose Show All Settings at the bottom first. I usually set both the Tab Size and the Indent Size to 2, leaving the other settings in the Tab panel untouched.

With the exception of the Tab Size being set to 2, all screen shots in this book show the default setup of Visual Web Developer.

Customizing Toolbars

Toolbars can be customized in three ways: you can show or hide the built-in toolbars, you can add and remove buttons on existing toolbars, and you can create your own toolbars with buttons you often use.

Enabling and Disabling Toolbars

You disable and enable existing toolbars by right-clicking any existing toolbar or the menu bar and then selecting the appropriate item from the list. Once the toolbar is displayed, you can use its drag grip at the left of the toolbar to drag it to a new location. You can drag the toolbars to any location in the IDE, including to the left and right sides of the screen where they’ll dock as vertical bars. You can also create them as floating toolbars and place them anywhere on the screen.

Editing Existing Toolbars

If you feel that an existing toolbar is missing an important button or that it contains buttons you rarely use, you can customize the buttons on the toolbar. To do this, right-click any toolbar or the menu bar and choose Customize. Next, make sure the toolbar you want to tweak is enabled by placing a check mark in front of it. Then switch to the Commands tab, choose a category from the list on the left, and then locate the command in the Command list at the right. You can now drag the command from the Customize window onto the toolbar.

Removing a button from a toolbar is even easier. With the Customize window still open, right-click the button and choose Delete.

While you’re in the Customize dialog box, you may want to enable the Show Shortcut Keys in ScreenTips setting on the Toolbars tab. This way, the toolbars for the button show the associated keyboard shortcut so it’s more likely you’ll memorize and use them. Shortcut keys are often easier to use than their toolbar button or menu counterparts.

Creating Your Own Toolbars

Creating your own toolbar is useful if you want to group some functions that you frequently use. To create a new toolbar, open the customize window as explained in the previous section. Click the New button and type a name for the toolbar. When you click OK, the new toolbar is displayed on the screen. You can now start dragging commands to it the same way as when you’re modifying the existing toolbars.

Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts

Another setting many developers like to change is keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are a good way to save time because they allow you to perform a task with a simple keyboard command instead of reaching for the mouse and selecting the appropriate item from the menu. To change the keyboard shortcuts, open the Customize dialog box again by right-clicking a toolbar or choosing it from the Tools menu. Next, click the Keyboard button. Locate the command for which you want to change the shortcut in the list with commands. Since this list contains many items, you can filter the list by typing a few letters from the command. For example, typing print in the Show commands containing field gives you a list of all print-related commands.

Next, in the Press shortcut keys field, type a new shortcut. VWD allows you to enter a double shortcut key for a single command. For example, you can bind the command Close All Documents to the command Ctrl+K, Ctrl+O. To perform this command, you need to press both key combinations in rapid succession. Although a double shortcut key may seem like overkill, it greatly increases the number of available shortcut keys.

Resetting Your Changes

Don’t worry if you feel that you have messed up VWD by trying out the numerous customization options. There are many ways to restore VWD to its previous state.

Resetting the Window Layout

This setting, accessible from the Window menu, resets all windows to the position they were in when you first started VWD. This command is useful if you misplaced too many windows and ended up with a cluttered IDE.

Resetting the Tool Box

If you removed a button from the Toolbox by mistake or even deleted an entire tab, you can reset the Toolbox to its original state by right-clicking the Toolbox and choosing Reset Toolbox. You need to think twice before you use this command because it will also delete all your custom code snippets.

Resetting All Settings

To completely revert all VWD settings to the way they were right after installation, choose Import and Export Settings from the Tools menu. Next, choose the Reset All Settings option and click Next. If you want, you can create a backup of the existing settings; otherwise, choose No, Just Reset Settings. Finally, click Finish. This action will cause all settings to be reset to their defaults, including the Windows layout, toolbox and Toolbox customizations, shortcut keys, and everything you may have changed in the VWD Options dialog box. So, use this command only when you’re really sure you want a fresh, new setup of VWD.

If you followed along with the previous Try It Out exercises, and then started experimenting with the customization possibilities, your IDE is now probably in one of two states: it either looks exactly the way you want it, or it looks like a complete mess. In the former case, you can skip the next exercise; in the latter case, stay tuned to see how easy it is to clean up the chaos.

Try it Out: Resetting All Settings

The following Try It Out shows you how to reset the IDE to the state it was in when you started VWD for the first time. Make sure you really want to do this before you follow the exercise, as the next exercise will reset all important settings, including Window and Toolbox customizations and all the options you set in the Options dialog box.

1. Start the Import and Export Settings Wizard by choosing Tools | Import and Export Settings.

2. Choose the Reset All Settings option at the bottom of the screen and click Next.

3. Let VWD create a backup of your current settings by selecting the first item in the dialog box. With this backup, you can always revert to the current setup by running the Import and Export Settings Wizard again.

4. Click Finish. The wizard resets all your settings and then displays a message reporting that the settings were successfully reset.

5. Click Close to exit the wizard. You’ll find that your IDE is now the same as it was the first time you started it.

Tip

All the changes you make to the IDE are stored in an XML configuration file in your Visual Studio Settings folder, which by default is located in a folder called Visual Studio 2008\Settings under your main Documents folder in Windows.

When you choose to reset your settings, VWD overwrites your settings file with a factory default. If you chose to create a backup, an additional backup file with today’s date in it is saved in the same folder. With that backup file, you can restore the settings at a later time.

With some basic knowledge about ASP.NET pages and VWD, it’s time for some real action. In the next chapter, you see how to create ASP.NET web sites and web pages in much more detail. You’ll learn how to organize your site in a logical and structured way, how to add the many different types of files to your site and how to use them, and how to connect the pages in your site.

However, before you can proceed to the next chapter, there is one more important topic you need to look at: the sample application that comes with this book.

The Sample Application

Building web sites is what this book is all about, so it makes a whole lot of sense that this book comes with a complete and functional sample site that is used to showcase many of the capabilities of ASP.NET.

The sample site you’ll build in this book is called Planet Wrox, a site that serves as an online community for people interested in music. The site offers the following features to its visitors:

• Reviews about CDs and concerts that have been posted on the site by the administrator.

• The Gig Pics section, an online photo album where users can share pictures taken at concerts.

• The ability to switch between the different graphical themes that the site offers, giving you a chance to change the look and feel of the site without altering the content.

• Musical preferences that influence the information you see on the site.

• Access to bonus content for users who register for an account.

From an administrative perspective (that is you, as the owner of the site) the site allows you to do the following:

• Add and maintain the reviews.

• Manage the different musical genres in the system.

• Decide which users you allow to access protected content such as special photo albums.

Figure 1-15 shows the Planet Wrox home page.

Figure 1-16 shows another page from Planet Wrox, but with a different theme applied. This page allows users to enter their personal information and specify preferences with regard to their favorite musical genres.

Figure 1-15

Figure 1-16

You can find an online running example of the site at www.PlanetWrox.com. There you can play around with the site from an end user’s perspective.

You can also download the source for the sample application and all other examples from this book from the Wrox web site at http://p2p.wrox.com/.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build all of the functionality from the sample site (and hopefully even more) in other web sites. Don’t worry if it sounds like an awful lot of complex things. I’ll guide you, step by step, from the beginning of the application all the way to the last feature. As long as you keep having fun doing this, I’m sure you’ll make it all the way.

Practical Tips on Visual Web Developer

Most of the chapters in this book end with a short section with useful tips. These are tips that either didn’t fit in anywhere in the text or that encourage you to further explore or test out things. Sometimes they may seem irrelevant or hard to understand at first, but you’ll find that as you make your way through this book and look back at tips from previous chapters, things start to make sense. Don’t worry if you don’t understand certain things completely the first time you see them. Give the idea some thought and revisit the topic a few days later. Hopefully, by letting the ideas sink in a little, things start to make more sense automatically. This applies not only to the Practical Tips section, but to the entire book.

• Before you move on to the next chapter, play around with VWD some more. Add a couple of pages to your site, drag and drop some controls from the Toolbox onto your pages, and view them in your browser. That way, you’ll have a better understanding of the tools and the many controls available when you start the next chapter.

• Familiarize yourself with the many options to tweak the Visual Web Developer IDE. When building web sites, you spend most of your time in this IDE, so it makes sense to tweak it as much as possible to your liking. Don’t be afraid to mess it up; you can always revert to previous settings.

• Take some time to browse through the settings you find in the Options dialog box of VWD (accessible through the Tools | Options menu). Many of the settings are self-explanatory and can really help further tweaking the IDE to your liking.

Summary

This chapter covered a lot of important ground to get you started with ASP.NET 3.5 and VWD. It started off with a brief history of the Microsoft .NET Framework in general and ASP.NET in particular.

You then learned how to acquire and install Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. VWD is the most extensive and versatile tool available for creating ASP.NET 3.5 web pages. To enable you to work with it effectively, this chapter showed you how to use and customize the main features of the IDE. In subsequent chapters, you will use and extend this knowledge to work with the many tools found in VWD.

It’s important to understand how a page in VWD makes it to your web browser. Some knowledge of the web server that serves the request and how the page is processed to deliver the final HTML in the browser is critical in understanding ASP.NET. This chapter gave you a short introduction in the way a web page is requested and served to the browser.

In the next chapter, you get a much more detailed explanation of creating web sites.

Exercises

1. Explain the differences between the markup of a page in VWD and the final HTML page in the browser.

2. Explain the difference between HTML and XHTML. How are the two related?

3. Imagine you have a number of HTML fragments that you expect to use a lot throughout the site. What’s the best way to make these fragments available in VWD?

4. What are three of the ways you can reset part or all of the IDE customization settings?

5. If you want to change the property of a control on your page, for example the text of a button, which two options do you have available to make the change?

Copyright

Figure 1-16Beginning Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008, Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., ISBN: 978-0-470-19134-7, Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Wrox, the Wrox logo, Wrox Programmer to Programmer, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc and/or its affiliates.