ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft's ASP.NET Web Matrix (Page 1 of 2 )
Like the year 2000, the introduction of Microsoft’s .NET initiative was met by many with mixed emotions: skepticism, excitement, and a fear of the end of civilization as we know it. Alright, so I can’t honestly say that I remember seeing anyone buying survivalist handbooks due to the introduction of .NET. Still, its introduction was a pretty monumental event, even outside of the Microsoft development community.Like the year 2000, the introduction of Microsoft’s .NET initiative was met by many with mixed emotions: skepticism, excitement, and a fear of the end of civilization as we know it. Alright, so I can’t honestly say that I remember seeing anyone buying survivalist handbooks due to the introduction of .NET. Still, its introduction was a pretty monumental event, even outside of the Microsoft development community. Projects which sought to work with, emulate, and even replace .NET, such as Ximian’s Mono and the FSF’s DotGNU projects (both Open Source implementations of the .NET idea) popped up in no time. Once people figured out what .NET was and where it was going, they were quick to jump in the bandwagon, one way or another.
One of the technologies at the core of this whole thing is ASP.NET. Due to its central role, having an understanding of ASP.NET has now become an integral part of your Web developer arsenal, regardless of whether you specialize in ASP.NET or not. These days, dynamic Web pages are the rule rather than the exception. In fact, some of the other popular technologies for accomplishing this are JSP and PHP. ASP.NET, however, brings us the power of dynamic pages and combines it with .NET in order to create what’s quite possibly the best dynamic page creation engine today.
This article has nothing to do with that. Ok, maybe just a little.
In this article I will give you a bit of an introduction to the ASP.NET Web Matrix, a free ASP.NET page editor that’s great for anyone who wants to learn to develop pages and applications in ASP.NET, but doesn’t have the money (or doesn’t care) to shell out the dough for Microsoft’s Visual Studio. I say a bit of an introduction because the program packs one heck of a punch for its 1.3MB package size. I’ll go over the basic functionality of the program as well as some of its key features. Finally, we’ll write a simple Web page in order to get you familiarized with the program’s usage. What I won’t do in this article is give you a deep set of explanations or get into the intricacies of any set of commands – I’ll presume you’re somewhat familiar with HTML. This tutorial is meant to introduce Web Matrix and a few of its ASP.NET page and HTML designer features.
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