Notepad, but you’ll gradually learn how to use Visual Web Developer to ease
some of the tasks we’ll tackle.
So let’s install this tool to make sure we’ll have it ready when we need it.
1.
Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/ and click the Download
link.
2. Execute the downloaded file.
3. Accept the default options. At one point, you’ll be asked about installing Mi-
crosoft MSDN 2005 Express Edition, which is the product’s documentation.
It wouldn’t hurt to install it, but you need to be patient, because it’s quite big.
(Note that you’ve already installed the .NET Framework 2.0 documentation,
together with the SDK.)
Bonus!
If you’ve already installed the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK, you’ve already
installed Microsoft MSDN 2005 Express Edition.
In this book, we’ll start using Visual Web Developer to build real web applications
in Chapter 5. Until then, we’ll create examples using Notepad (or another simple
text editor) so you’re prepared to take full advantage of the features offered by
Visual Web Developer when the time comes to use it.
Writing your First ASP.NET Page
For your first ASP.NET exercise, we’ll create the simple example shown in Fig-
ure 1.15.
Figure 1.15. Your first ASP.NET page
26
Chapter 1: Introducing ASP.NET and the .NET Platform
Let’s get started! Open your text editor (Notepad is fine). If you have software
that creates ASP.NET pages automatically, such as Visual Studio .NET or Visual
Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, please don’t use it yet—while these are
great tools that allow you to get up and running quickly, they do assume that
you already understand how ASP.NET works.
So, open your text editor, and create a new file named FirstPage.aspx in the
Learning folder you created earlier. Start editing FirstPage.aspx by entering
the HTML for our page, shown below:
File: FirstPage.aspx (excerpt)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My First ASP.NET 2.0 Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello there!</p>
<p>The time is now: </p>
</body>
</html>
So far, so good, right? Now, let’s add some ASP.NET code that will create the
dynamic elements of the page, starting with the time.
File: FirstPage.aspx (excerpt)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My First ASP.NET 2.0 Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello there!</p>
<p>The time is now:
<asp:Label runat="server" id="timeLabel" /></p>
</body>
</html>
We’ve added an <asp:Label/> tag to the document. This is a special tag that
lets us insert dynamic content into the page. The asp: part of the tag name
identifies it as a built-in ASP.NET tag. ASP.NET comes with numerous built-in
tags; <asp:Label/> is one of the simplest.
27
Writing your First ASP.NET Page
The runat="server" attribute identifies the tag as something that needs to be
handled on the server. In other words, the web browser will never see the
<asp:Label/> tag; when the page is requested by the client, ASP.NET sees it
and converts it to regular HTML tags before the page is sent to the browser. It’s
up to us to write the code that will tell ASP.NET to replace this particular tag
with the current time.
To do this, we must add some script to our page. ASP.NET gives you the choice
of a number of different languages to use in your scripts. The two most common
languages are VB and C#. Let’s take a look at examples using both. Here’s a
version of the page in VB:
Visual Basic File: FirstPage.aspx (excerpt)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My First ASP.NET Page</title>
<script runat="server" language="VB">
Sub Page_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs)
timeLabel.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString()
End Sub
</script>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello there!</p>
<p>The time is now:
<asp:Label runat="server" id="timeLabel" /></p>
</body>
</html>
Here’s the same page written in C#:
C# File: FirstPage.aspx (excerpt)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My First ASP.NET Page</title>
<script runat="server" language="C#">
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
timeLabel.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString();
}
</script>
28
Chapter 1: Introducing ASP.NET and the .NET Platform
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