Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix®

Foreword

Back in 1997, when I began my career as a professional web developer, I started working with Classic ASP. After a brief training period in a few different programming languages such as C++ and Java, I was thrown in at the deep end and assigned to a project to build an Intranet application for a large consultancy firm in the Netherlands using Classic ASP. Despite the complexity of the project and my lack of experience at the time, I was still able to make valuable contributions to the code base. This was partly due to the great support I received from my more experienced colleagues, but also because of how approachable Classic ASP was. Although it’s considered outdated now, Classic ASP had a few great features that made it the technology of choice for many developers for a long period of time. One of the things I really liked about it was how approachable it was. You didn’t need complex and overwhelming tools, but instead you could use a simple text editor that had features such as color coding and multiple tabs. Deployment was also very easy: You just uploaded the file to the server and the changes would be applied immediately. For features not supported out-of-the-box (such as image scaling and uploading of files), one of my colleagues would write a DLL in Visual Basic 6 to get the job done. I had great respect for those that possessed these skills as it seemed pretty complicated at that time.

Then in early 2000, ASP.NET was released. It marked a radical change in web ...