Visual Studio Is Not Mandatory
It’s fair to say that this book relies on Visual Studio to do a fair amount of the code generation for you as you work through the examples. Such features as the Toolbox, the data source wizards you’ll see in Chapter 7, the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) editors in Chapter 10, and much more all speed up our development time, and the debugger is a fantastic piece of work. However, that’s not to say it’s the only way to do it. Before we start getting comfortable with VS2008, let’s look at a little example to show that you really can write a web page with a simple text editor and how much easier it is to do the same thing in VS2008.
You will create the same simple web page in two different ways: once using a text editor (Notepad) and then again using VS2008.
Tip
This is the only time in the entire book that you will create a website without using VS2008, and it requires you to have Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) installed. If you don’t have it installed, you cannot run the page without opening it in VS2008.
XP users can install it via Control Panel → Add\Remove Programs → Windows Components. Vista users will find the option under Control Panel → Programs and Features → Turn Windows features on or off. In both cases, you’ll need administrative privileges to install it, and you can accept the default options.
Using either technique, the resultant web page should look something like that shown in Figure 4-1. This page will demonstrate some of ...