Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix®

Chapter 4

Programming Your Site

What you will learn in this chapter:

• Where Razor, C#, and VB fit within ASP.NET Web Pages
• Programming fundamentals
• The basics of the Razor syntax
• Separating code and functionality
• Creating your own reusable functions
• The key objects you will work with in Web Pages

The primary purpose of programming is to exercise control over the behavior of your application. When you first conceive your website, you know what purpose it is intended to serve. It may provide your visitors with news stories on demand. It may provide a means for visitors to locate and order an item they wish to purchase. It might simply provide them with a means to view your personal photo album, but in an order and manner they choose. How your application behaves will depend on the set of programming instructions you embed within it. You will decide what your visitors can and cannot do or see. You will decide what options you want to provide them with, and under what conditions these will be made available. You determine the logical behavior of your application and embed that logic through the programming language available to you.

Your application will need to make decisions based on conditions that you define. For example, if the current user is authenticated, your application might provide them with a means to administer content. If the user selects a particular option within a form, your application will present certain data to them. If they make a different selection, your ...