Programming C#, 4th Edition

Chapter 15. Programming ASP.NET Applications and Web Services

Developers are writing more and more of their applications to run over the Web.

There are many obvious advantages. For one, you don’t have to create as much of the user interface; you can let Internet Explorer and other browsers handle a lot of the work for you. Another, perhaps bigger, advantage is that distribution of the application and of revisions is faster, easier, and less expensive. Most important, a web application can be run on any platform by any user at any location; this is harder to do (though not impossible) with smart-client applications.

The third advantage of web applications is distributed processing, though smart-client applications are making inroads. With a web-based application, it is easy to provide server-side processing, and 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 2.0, which provides a rich collection of types for building web applications in its System.Web and System.Web.UI namespaces. There is a great deal to learn about ASP.NET, but much of it is language-independent. ASP.NET offers a rich suite of controls and related tools, including tools to validate data, display dates, present advertisements, interact with users, and so forth. Most of these require no coding whatsoever.

The focus of this chapter is where ASP.NET and C# programming intersect: ...