Introducing ASP.NET 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005
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This article introduces you to designing and working with an SQL Server 2005 database using the Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment. You will also learn how to work with the “Grid View” control.
This application is developed with Visual Studio 2005 (Beta Version) on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition using SQL Server 2005 (Beta Version) as the database.
Something new when creating a new web application
Everyone (mainly .NET developers) anxiously awaited the recent release of the new product Visual Studio.NET 2005 (and of course SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006) from Microsoft, scheduled for November 7, 2005. In this article, we examined what we can do with the new product Visual Studio 2005 together with SQL Server 2005, before it was released (working with betas).
Before proceeding further, just recollect the scenario when Visual Studio.NET (the first version) was released. At that time everyone may have been confused by the large number of features of Visual Studio.NET when compared with Visual Studio 6.0. Primarily, the biggest change in Visual Studio.NET was a single IDE for all .NET languages. Even though everyone was confused at the beginning, slowly they picked up on it, and now most developers feel very comfortable working with Visual Studio.NET 2003. Now, Microsoft is not making too many changes from Visual Studio.NET 2003 to Visual Studio.NET 2005. But there are certain features which are worth discussing (apart from Team based editions of Visual Studio.NET 2005).
I shall go through creating a new project in Visual Studio 2005 before focusing on “database design.” In previous versions, File->New->Project was enough to create either Windows applications or web applications. Microsoft made slight changes to the means of creating a new project in its Visual Studio 2005 product, compared with previous versions of Visual Studio.NET products. Now for Visual Studio 2005, File->New Project will create a Windows application (and others), whereas File->New Website will create a web application.
After clicking on File->New Website, we can select “ASP.NET Web Application” (as shown in Figure 1) to create a web application.
If you carefully look at the above figure, there exists a dropdown list at the bottom, labelled “Location.” In previous versions, you created your applications using a virtual directory (something like “wwwroot”), which is generally administered with IIS. In fact, IIS seems to be compulsory in previous versions of Visual Studio.NET.
But now, to work with Visual Studio 2005 web applications (or ASP.NET applications), IIS is no longer compulsory. It comes with its own “thin web server” (a scaled down version of IIS) for developing and testing ASP.NET applications. You can select “File System” within the “location” dropdown list, if you want to use this thin web server. If you have installed and configured IIS, then you can go with the option “HTTP” (which is quite similar to VS.NET 2003). If you want to create the application remotely, then you can go for “FTP.” For this article, we proceed with “File System” (which is the default).
Please note that Visual Studio 2005 never creates any project files or solution files when you select the “File System” option. You can directly open the folder using “Open Website” available within the “File” menu.
Next: Connecting to the Database using the Visual Studio 2005 “Server Explorer” Window >>
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