Programming Visual Basic .NET, Second Edition

Chapter 15. Building Web Applicationswith Web Forms

Rather than writing traditional Windows desktop and client-server applications, more and more developers are now writing web-based applications, even when their software is for desktop use. There are many obvious advantages. For one, you do not have to create as much of the user interface; you can let Internet Explorer and other browsers handle a lot of it for you. Another, perhaps bigger advantage is that distribution of revisions is faster, easier, and less expensive. When I worked at an online network that predated the Web, we estimated our cost of distribution for each upgrade at $1 million per diskette (remember diskettes?). Web applications have virtually zero distribution cost. The third advantage of web applications is distributed processing. With a web-based application, it is far easier to provide server-side processing. The Web provides standardized protocols (e.g., HTTP, HTML, and XML) to facilitate building n-tier applications.

The .NET technology for building web applications (and dynamic web sites) is ASP.NET, which provides a rich collection of types for building web applications in its System.Web and System.Web.UI namespaces. In this chapter, the focus is on where ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET programming intersect: the creation of Web Forms.

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This can be only a brief introduction to Web Forms. For complete coverage of this rich and powerful technology, please see Programming ASP.NET, by Jesse Liberty and Dan ...