Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Client-Side Web Development

When you talk about client-side development you are talking about writing JavaScript code that runs in the user's browser. Client-side Web development uses neither Visual Basic nor .NET (i.e., the focus of this book), but the topic is too important to ignore altogether. While the use of server-side technologies to build Web applications is still very popular, the amount of development being done for the client-side has been growing rapidly and will most likely continue to grow in the foreseeable future.

Just like you did with the server-side technologies, you'll get an overview of the client-side technologies so you can decide if you want to investigate them further.

Web Development with HTML and JavaScript

You are going to build a sample application using only HTML and JavaScript. As mentioned a moment ago, most developers using Visual Studio to build Web applications are using some server-side technology, so it would be rare to see an application built this way, but doing so gives us the greatest opportunity to explore the topic of this section.

REST Services and the Web API

Client-side code relies heavily on Web services to communicate with the server to get and update data. While you can call SOAP services from JavaScript, it's much easier to work with REST services. Instead of having to construct an XML document to make a service call as you do with SOAP, you just make a Web request with specific information in the URL in REST. Instead of getting ...