Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

Chapter 2. Building an ASP.NET Web Site

To create good-looking, functional, and successful web sites, you have to understand a number of important technologies and languages, including HTML, ASP.NET, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. This and upcoming chapters provide a solid foundation in these technologies, so you should be comfortable with the most important concepts once you've finished this book.

Besides these technologies, you also have to understand the Visual Web Developer IDE that was introduced in the previous chapter. You need to know how to create sites, add pages, and manage all the toolbars and windows that Visual Web Developer (VWD) offers you. In addition, you need to know how to build and design web pages in VWD with HTML and server controls.

This chapter shows you, in detail, how to create and manage your web sites. It also shows you how to create your ASP.NET web pages and add markup to them, allowing you to create useful web pages that can present information to the user and react to their response.

In particular, this chapter examines:

• Two different project types for building ASP.NET web sites

• The different project templates that are available to jumpstart your site development and how to use them

• The numerous different file types available in ASP.NET and what they are used for

• Ways to create structured web sites that are easy to manage, now and in the future

• How to use the designer tools to create formatted web pages

Although you already created your ...