Preface
ASP.NET 3.5 is arguably the fastest, most efficient, most reliable, and best-supported way to create interactive web applications available today. Combined with the development tools available from Microsoft (both free and commercial), it is incredibly easy to create web sites that look great and perform well. Best of all, most of the “plumbing” (security, data access, layout, and so on) is taken care of for you by the .NET Framework.
About This Book
This book will teach you how to build professional quality, interactive, robust data-driven web applications using Visual Basic 2008.
ASP.NET is not difficult to learn. All of the concepts are straightforward, and the Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer environments simplify the process of building powerful web applications. The difficulty in ASP.NET is only that it is so complete and flexible that there are many pieces that must be woven together to build a robust, scalable, and efficient application. This book cuts to the heart of the matter, showing in clear, easy-to-follow steps how to understand and build a web site.
ASP.NET makes it possible to create sophisticated and useful sites with minimal coding. You can enhance the functionality of your sites with Visual Basic or C#, if you choose, but the amount of code that you must write is surprisingly small. We’ve adopted that philosophy throughout this book, showing you how to take the most advantage of the tools Microsoft and ASP.NET provide while keeping the coding to a minimum. ...