How To: “Getting Started with ASP.NET 2.0”

I have been asked a number of times, by students, fresh graduates and my office colleagues, on how to get started with ASP.NET 2.0? The people asking me this question have different exposures (some haven’t worked in the web domain at all, some have worked on static web pages, some have worked in classical ASP 3.0, some have worked in other server side scripting languages like JSP/PHP etc and some have worked in ASP.NET 1.1) but all of them have a Computer Science background, and now they are looking for the tips & trick and resources to get their hands on ASP.NET 2.0.

So, I decided to share “My Proposed Strategy of Learning ASP.NET 2.0” over here for people to look at and get started. Although the points listed below don’t apply to every one, and that varies, depending on a person’s level of exposure in engineering web applications.

My strategy is to start from the basics and finally conclude by providing pointers to resources for engineering more sophisticated applications in ASP.NET 2.0.

Know how of basics i.e. HTML, JavaScript and CSS
One thing a person must have an idea of, before directly starting to work on ASP.NET 2.0 is the basics and the fundamentals of developing any web page i.e. the person should have the idea of HTML, JavaScript as well as CSS. Without the basic knowledge of these three, it’s really not going to end up too far in engineering sophisticated web applications. One quick reference to get started on all these is http://www.w3schools.com/. Navigate to the relevant tutorials on the left panel to get a quick review of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Know how of Client-Server Interaction in Web Apps
Once you are done with the basics, you should have an idea of the interaction of the Client (web browser) and the web server (IIS etc) in any web based application.

The client sends a request to the server, server processes that request and finally sends the response back to the client. So, it’s a “request/response” based interaction between the web client and the web server.

Moreover this interaction between the client and the server is stateless. Cookies are used to maintain state at the client as well as the server between the successive requests made by a single client (wherever management of user state, between successive requests is required).

Know how of Implicit Objects in any Server Side Scripting Language
After that, a person should have an idea of what a server side scripting language is and the implicit objects available in that as well as the capability / role of each of those implicit objects. Those implicit objects include Request, Response, Server, Application and Session.

Development Environment
Once you are done with this much background knowledge, you should have the right development tools / IDE as well as the .NET 2.0 Framework (also comes packaged with IDE) installed on your machine. If you have Visual Studio 2005 available with you, that’s well and good as it will install the Framework, the IDE as well as the SQL Server 2005 Express through a single install package. Otherwise you can download and install the “Free Version” in the name of Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (IDE for ASP.NET 2.0, contains the.NET Framework 2.0) and the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (Backend Database Server). You can download them from for free from the Microsoft Website i.e. http://www.microsoft.com/express/2005/download/default.aspx

ASP.NET 2.0 Beginners / How Do I Video Tutorials
A picture is worth a thousand words and a guided video have a much more impact. So I recommend people to view web casts on ASP.NET 2.0 and related topics to have a better and quicker insight of it. The official ASP.NET website provides a very good pool of video tutorials on ASP.NET 2.0 which I strongly recommend people to download, watch and eventually apply. You can point to http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/#beginners for those video tutorials.

ASP.NET 2.0 Quickstart Samples
By now you must have been able to develop a good enough small sized web application in ASP.NET 2.0. However you still are in need to some samples / code examples and a quick description of each of the feature of ASP.NET 2.0. Here, the excellently tailored ASP.NET 2.0 Quickstarts serves the purpose. You can point to the official ASP.NET website http://quickstarts.asp.net/ for an online version of these code examples and related descriptions of each of the features of ASP.NET 2.0. The code samples in these Quickstarts are available both in C# and VB.NET depending on user preference.

Microsoft Patterns & Practices: Enterprise Library
People at Microsoft Patterns & Practices are working quite devotedly to provide you with Libraries and APIs needed for the development of your applications in .NET Framework. You can leverage from their very first initiative the Enterprise Library, which has evolved over the period of time and is much mature now. You can get the latest version 3.1 of it, which works with the .NET Framework 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.5 from http://www.codeplex.com/entlib

Microsoft Patterns & Practices: Software Factories
Still need some more pointers to engineer a more sophisticated web applications? Look for the Software Factories; another great initiative of Microsoft Patterns and Practices Team. Refer to the Web Client Software Factory on CodePlex for more details.

Strongly Recommended
The Data Access Application Block, Logging Application and Caching Application Block of the Enterprise Library are the ones which one must try. I can guarantee that you will find them really helpful in engineering your applications without bothering much about these common functionalities.

I also strongly recommend all those who want to have quick hands on, on ASP.NET 2.0 to locally install quick-starts on their own development machines (available under the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK in Visual Studio 2005 installer), and go through the topics and code samples whenever you are free. This will really help you in getting a broader idea of the capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0.