Beginning ASP.NET 4.5: in C# and VB

Chapter 1

Getting Started with ASP.NET 4.5

What you will learn in this chapter:

• How to acquire and install Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web and Visual Studio 2012
• How to create your first website with Visual Studio Express 2012
• How an ASP.NET page is processed by the server and sent to the browser
• How you can use and customize the development environment

Ever since the first release of the .NET Framework 1.0 in early 2002, Microsoft has put a lot of effort and development time into ASP.NET, the part of the .NET Framework that enables you to build rich web applications. This first release meant a radical change from the older Microsoft technology to build websites called Active Server Pages (ASP), now often referred to as classic ASP. The introduction of ASP.NET 1.0 and the associated Visual Studio .NET gave developers the following benefits over classic ASP:

• A clean separation between presentation and code. With classic ASP, your programming logic was often scattered throughout the HTML of the page, making it hard to make changes to the page later.
• A development model that was much closer to the way desktop applications are programmed. This made it easier for the many Visual Basic desktop programmers to make the switch to web applications.
• A feature-rich development tool (called Visual Studio .NET) that enabled developers to create and code their web applications visually.
• A choice between a number of object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, of which Visual Basic .NET ...