What is this book about?

ASP.NET 1.0 is the final release of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP). It is a powerful server-based technology designed to create dynamic, interactive, HTML pages for web sites and corporate intranets. ASP.NET is a core element of Microsoft's exciting .NET vision, building on the strengths of the .NET Framework to provide many new features not seen in previous versions of ASP.

This book, entirely revised and updated for the final release, will provide you with a step-by-step introduction to ASP.NET using C#, with plenty of worked examples to help you to gain a deep understanding of what ASP.NET is all about, and how you can harness it to build powerful web applications.

What does this book cover?

In this book, you will learn how to

• Create basic ASP.NET pages with C#
• Understand the concepts of Object Oriented Programming
• Work with data and XML
• Debug and handling errors in your code
• Use ASP.NET Server Controls
• Create user controls and components
• Explore the world of Web services
• Optimize performance
• Secure your application

By the end of this book you will be able to understand, adapt, maintain and secure ASP.NET web sites with ease.

Who is this book for?

This book is aimed at relatively inexperienced web builders who are looking to enrich their sites with dynamically-generated content, and want to learn how to start building web applications using ASP.NET. Developers who have a little experience with previous versions of ASP (and are looking to move over to ASP.NET), may also find this book helpful in getting a simple grasp on what ASP.NET is, what it does, and how it can be used. Experience of basic HTML is required, but previous experience of ASP is not essential. We'll be teaching the basics of C# in this book, so prior experience with the language is not required.

What you need to know

This book is for beginners who have no previous experience of ASP, C#, XML, object-oriented programming, or the .NET Framework. A little knowledge of HTML is useful, but by no means essential as all the concepts that you need in order to create dynamic ASP.NET web sites are presented and explained in full.

What you will learn from this book

This book will teach you how to build tailored ASP.NET web sites from the ground up. It covers the following broad topics (see the book's Introduction for a more detailed explanation):

• The early part of the book is dedicated to familiarizing you with the anatomy and basic functionality of HTML, XML, ASP.NET, the .NET Framework, and C#. This done, it looks at the way in which they can be used together to create flexible web sites.
• The second part of the book introduces object-oriented programming which is crucial to maximizing your benefit from .NET. Ideas are explained in detail with many programmatic examples and real-world analogies.
• Having laid the groundwork we then progress to discussing the technologies and techniques that ASP.NET can draw upon to increase its functionality. This includes ADO.NET for data source access, Web Services for inter-web site communication and the encapsulation ideas of Server and User Controls to ease code maintenance and reuse.
• The book concludes by considering the ways in which you can optimize your ASP.NET sites to increase their speed, security, and robustness; detailed advice on debugging is also included.

"ASP.NET is a logical and powerful progression for developers - it's the future for web development. This book provides the perfect platform for those moving into this exciting technology. Once you reach the end of this book, you will be prepared to confront the exciting new world of .NET web application development."
-Robin Dewson, Consultant, Lehman Brothers.