Professional Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 20. ASP.NET Web Forms

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• The differences between Web Site and Web Application projects

• Using the HTML and CSS design tools to control the layout of your web pages

• Easily generating highly functional web applications with the server-side web controls

• Adding rich client-side interactions to your web pages with JavaScript and ASP.NET AJAX

When Microsoft released the first version of ASP.NET, one of the most talked-about features was the capability to create a full-blown web application in the same way as you would create a Windows application. The abstractions provided by ASP.NET coupled with the rich tooling support in Visual Studio allowed programmers to quickly develop feature-rich applications that ran over the Web in a wholly integrated way.

ASP.NET version 2.0, which was released in 2005, was a major upgrade that included new features such as a provider model for everything from menu navigation to user authentication, more than 50 new server controls, a web portal framework, and built-in web site administration, to name but a few. These enhancements made it even easier to build complex web applications in less time.

Most of the new features in the latest version of ASP.NET and Visual Studio have focused on improving the client-side development experience. These include enhancements to the HTML Designer and CSS editing tools, better IntelliSense support for JavaScript, HTML and JavaScript snippets, and new project templates.

In this chapter you learn how to ...