Chapter 15. ProgrammingWeb Applications with 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 Netscape Navigator 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,
I’ll focus on where ASP.NET and C# programming intersect: the
creation of Web Forms. (For coverage of ASP.NET alone, see my
upcoming book, Programming ASP.NET,
O’Reilly, 2001.)
Web Forms bring Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques (such as those used in ...
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