Datasheet

You can find an online running example of the site at www.PlanetWrox.com. There you can play around
with the site from an end user’s perspective.
You can also download the source for the sample application and all other examples from this book from
the Wrox web site at
http://p2p.wrox.com/.
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build all of the functionality from the sample site (and hopefully
even more) in other web sites. Don’t worry if it sounds like an awful lot of complex things. I’ll guide you,
step by step, from the beginning of the application all the way to the last feature. As long as you keep
having fun doing this, I’m sure you’ll make it all the way.
Practical Tips on Visual Web Developer
Most of the chapters in this book end with a short section with useful tips. These are tips that either didn’t
fit in anywhere in the text or that encourage you to further explore or test out things. Sometimes they may
seem irrelevant or hard to understand at first, but you’ll find that as you make your way through this book
and look back at tips from previous chapters, things start to make sense. Don’t worry if you don’t under-
stand certain things completely the first time you see them. Give the idea some thought and revisit the
topic a few days later. Hopefully, by letting the ideas sink in a little, things start to make more sense auto-
matically. This applies not only to the Practical Tips section, but to the entire book.
❑ Before you move on to the next chapter, play around with VWD some more. Add a couple of
pages to your site, drag and drop some controls from the Toolbox onto your pages, and view
them in your browser. That way, you’ll have a better understanding of the tools and the many
controls available when you start the next chapter.
❑ Familiarize yourself with the many options to tweak the Visual Web Developer IDE. When build-
ing web sites, you spend most of your time in this IDE, so it makes sense to tweak it as much as
possible to your liking. Don’t be afraid to mess it up; you can always revert to previous settings.
❑ Take some time to browse through the settings you find in the Options dialog box of VWD
(accessible through the Tools ➪ Options menu). Many of the settings are self-explanatory and
can really help further tweaking the IDE to your liking.
Summary
This chapter covered a lot of important ground to get you started with ASP.NET 3.5 and VWD. It started
off with a brief history of the Microsoft .NET Framework in general and ASP.NET in particular.
You then learned how to acquire and install Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. VWD is the most
extensive and versatile tool available for creating ASP.NET 3.5 web pages. To enable you to work with it
effectively, this chapter showed you how to use and customize the main features of the IDE. In subsequent
chapters, you will use and extend this knowledge to work with the many tools found in VWD.
It’s important to understand how a page in VWD makes it to your web browser. Some knowledge of the
web server that serves the request and how the page is processed to deliver the final HTML in the browser
30
Chapter 1: Getting Started with ASP.NET 3.5
87593c01.qxd:WroxPro 1/25/08 9:05 AM Page 30