Skip to content

1. Introduction

The PDF of this document is available |HERE|.

This document is a course supplement: it is not a complete course. Further study requires the assistance of an instructor, and furthermore, a number of topics have not been covered. Its writing was influenced by the author’s background, having previously written two documents on web development—first in Java and then in PHP. These two documents have a similar structure, allowing for a comparison of the two technologies using the same examples. The same approach has been taken here for ASP.NET development. This results in a document quite different from what is found in bookstores, where almost all books emphasize that ASP.NET allows you to develop a web application just as you would develop a Windows application. The interface displayed in the client’s browser can be built like a Windows interface:

  • using IDEs such as Visual Studio.NET or WebMatrix, the user interface is built using graphical objects that are dragged and dropped into the design window
  • these objects have properties, methods, and generate events

Here, we cover only the bare essentials of these concepts, which are considered among the most innovative in ASP.NET... These important but non-fundamental concepts are covered in Volume 2 of this course. In this Volume 1, we felt it was more important to focus on the fundamentals of web development, which apply regardless of the technology used (Java, PHP, ASP.NET). The proprietary extensions of ASP.NET that enable greater productivity will be covered later. In our presentation of web development, we place great emphasis on the MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture, which is often recommended for building web applications. This concept is independent of the technology used. It happens to clash with the approach of designing a web application as a Windows application, as advocated by ASP.NET technology. This is the other reason why this concept, so highly praised in ASP.NET literature, has been relegated to Volume 2.

Because this document is intended for students, we use only tools freely available on the internet for our examples. Readers will thus be able to obtain them and test the examples on their own computers. The appendix "Web Tools" provides instructions for obtaining and installing these tools.

Serge Tahé

April 2004

https://tahe.developpez.com
This tutorial written by Serge Tahé is made available to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commercial – ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.