1.8. 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.