Learning ASP.NET 3.5, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Building Web Applications

You’ve built your first web site, and you’ve gotten your feet wet, which is great. But so far, you’ve only used two controls: Label and Button. You’ve seen the Toolbox in the IDE, and it’s stuffed with controls just waiting for you to experiment with. That’s exactly what you’re going to do in this chapter. You’ll build a functional order form for a fictional business, even though you won’t do anything just yet with the data your form will collect. You’ll get to try out many of the basic controls in Design view and Source view; you’ll learn about web site fundamentals, selection controls, and their collections of items, and you’ll see how to display the results retrieved by one control in another control somewhere else on the page.

Mastering Web Site Fundamentals

The difference between a web page that simply displays information and a web application that interacts with your user is the application’s ability to gather data from the user, process it on the server, and take action accordingly. The core of a web application is the page and its interactive controls. This part of the chapter will introduce the web page and the types of controls that you’ll use throughout the remainder of this book and throughout your ASP.NET programming career. We will also introduce the mindset that will move your applications from being a “brochure” that displays information into an interactive application delivered over the Web.

The Page

Every ASP.NET web site consists ...