1. Introduction

The PDF for 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, who had 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 development in ASP.NET. This results in a document quite different from what is found in bookstores, where virtually all books emphasize that ASP.NET allows one to develop a web application in the same way one develops a Windows application. The interface presented in the client’s browser can be built like a Windows interface:

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

Here, we cover only the bare minimum regarding these concepts, which are considered the most innovative in ASP.NET... These important but non-fundamental concepts are presented in Volume 2 of this course. In this Volume 1, it seemed more important to emphasize the fundamentals of web development that are common to all technologies (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 architecture (Model, View, Controller), which is often recommended for building web applications. This concept is independent of the technology used. It happens to be at odds 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 the 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 personal computers. The appendix “Web Tools” provides instructions for obtaining and installing these tools.

Serge Tahé

April 2004