Special Edition Using Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET

Understanding the Web Forms Programming Model

The Web Forms programming model is Microsoft’s attempt to do for Web development what earlier versions of Visual Basic did for Windows development. The traditional method of programming the World Wide Web has been to write code on a Web server that generates HTML for the client browser. This approach (which we covered in the last chapter) is perfectly functional, but not very elegant. Let’s examine why, by looking at the code you would need to allow a user to update his address via a Web page. In a traditional Web application, you would have to write the following code:

• You need to access the database and generate the initial HTML form for the end user. First, you use ADO.NET to get the user’s address ...