Working in Visual Studio in Visual C#

Encoder Code 39 Extended in Visual C# Working in Visual Studio

You already know the basics of working in Visual Studio in C#; we have been working in Visual Studio all along Working with Visual Studio in the Web world is a little different, but not much Using Visual Studio to build a Web application is a lot like WPF actually, because Web applications have a code element to the design view the HTML document, in an ASPX file Then there is a code element, in an ASPXCS file A lot of other files make Web pages work, too There are images and style sheets and script files All of them have editors in Visual Studio None of them have a darn thing to do with C#, though, so I won t talk about them much here For more on those files, see the upcoming section, Recognizing the other file types, or refer to ASPNET 35 For Dummies by Ken Cox Let s set up a simple site in Visual Studio You ll use it to look at all of Visual Studio s cool Web features Then you can begin looking at more complex sites Here s all you need to do to set up your simple site:

1 Open Visual Studio, and click on Projects, and then New Project 2 In the New Project dialog box, select Visual C# in the treeview to the

left, then Web, and choose ASPNET Web application in the right-side window I named mine AspNetFirstSample

Visual Studio makes a project Hey, that s it It runs a lot like all the other projects that you have done, making all the files that you need to make a Web project work To run the project, press <F5> When you do so, Visual Studio launches Cassini, the Web Server that comes with Visual Studio Your Web browser launches, and your project launches Now let s make it complicated Web applications have a lot of moving parts, which can be hard to manage Visual Studio makes it as easy as anything I have worked with in 17 years of Web development to manage a Web application

Visual Studio launches the Web project in the designer The only problem is that the designer shows a Code View of sorts That s not going to help us build this application right away, is it

Back in the day, visual interfaces were developed using a black box architecture A black box architecture is a way of designing a component so that the user has no idea how it works You used a visual designer to place objects on a page, and the locations and such were stored in a custom binary format Nothing about the document, the form itself, was really editable without the designer HTML, and now XAML, changes all that Forms are now at least laid out using standards-based, well-understood markup language To view a form designer, click the Design tab You ll get a blank view there That s okay for now You are going to add stuff Click the Toolbox tab all the way to the left I have used the toolbox for Windows Forms and other applications Now it has the controls for Web applications Open the Standard tree view The Standard tree view has the main HTML controls that are part of the standard library with an ASPNET twist Drag a Label control and a Button control onto the Web form It should look like Figure 2-1

What have you done here Well, you have added a Label control which becomes a <SPAN> tag with some text in it, and a Button control that will effectively be an <INPUT> tag when you are done