Introduction

ASP.NET is Microsoft s upgrade to Active Server Pages (ASP). ASP.NET architecture is very well woven into the .NET Framework to provide a powerful event-driven programming model. The new feature of code-behind allows true separation of code and design. Also, you can write ASP.NET pages in any of the managed languages, and the code is compiled to give high performance.

This chapter acquaints you with writing Web Forms and database-driven Web applications. You will see how you can leverage the use of XML data in the .NET Framework within ASP.NET applications, through real world examples (a shopping cart and a message board). We also explain how to e-mail from ASP.NET, which includes an example of a simple e-mail ASP.NET page.

In all the examples, we cover a broad range of new features in ASP.NET. One of these is the capability to have custom validation embedded into the pages from JavaScript (.js) files, which originate from the root on the server; ASP.NET has a whole host of validation controls to use. Also the backbone of the .NET architecture is built on XML. The use of XSL/Transforms on XML data from DataSets provide the developer with the ability to create custom content for various clients with minimal program logic overhead. We demonstrate this in the message board example included in this chapter.

ASP.NET is a more robust way to bring applications to the Web. Gone are the endless lines of spaghetti code and with it the ambiguous debugging. With ASP.NET, you...