Datasheet

About the Example Application
In this book, you will be building a Web site that displays and sells products— a common scenario
for many Web developers today. It is not a complicated site in comparison to many “out there” but is
extensive enough to demonstrate most of the features of ASP.NET 2.0 and VWD, as well as showing you
the prime techniques and approaches that are used as the foundations for almost all Web sites built
using version 2.0 of .NET. The product you will see in the demonstration site is not complicated either.
The site is a fictional online pizza parlor that sells and delivers pizzas and drinks to customers.
Figure 1-1 shows the page in the example application that lists the items available from “Pizza Pretty
Quick,” or as you will see it described throughout the book, “PPQ.” The page header and the menu you
see at the left are part of a master page. This makes is easy to achieve a consistent look and feel for the
whole site, and saves a lot of work both when creating new pages and when updating the site design.
Data for the list of available items comes from a database table stored in a local copy of SQL Server 2005
Express Edition running on the same machine as VWD.
Figure 1-1: The completed site, showing the list of items you can order
The installation routine for VWD allows you to install SQL Server Express as part of the main program
installation. Alternatively, if required, you can access data stored in SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server
2005 on another machine. The set of examples you can download for this book contains the SQL Server
database.
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