This book shows you just how powerful, and yet easy to use, the new Web development environment from Microsoft really is. Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, along with the relational database SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, allows you to build great Web sites using drag-and-drop techniques, wizards, and a huge range of developer-friendly tools and controls. The book demonstrates this by leading you through the creation of a fully featured and highly interactive e-commerce Web application, like those you are used to seeing on the Internet today.

Visual Web Developer is an environment based on the latest release of the Microsoft .NET Framework, version 2.0, which includes the Web programming and runtime features that make up ASP.NET 2.0. ASP.NET has evolved over the previous several years from the original Microsoft Active Server pages (ASP) scripting platform that pioneered many of the current techniques in Web programming. However, ASP.NET leaves the scripting world behind. It offers a development environment that generates compiled code, includes a full range of tools that enable implementation of even the most complex feature quickly and easily, and provides plenty of resource-based help and code creation assistance. On top of all this, the execution efficiency of the .NET platform means that your Web sites and applications run more quickly and reliably than ever before. This is not a reference book. You will not find listings of the objects, classes, properties, and methods of each feature in ASP.NET. Instead, this book is task-focused to provide you with the experience of working in Visual Web Developer, quickly getting to grips with the environment and ASP.NET, and learning how to achieve the kinds of requirements you will meet every day as you build your applications. For example, after a brief section on installing Visual Web Developer and an introduction to the development environment, Chapter 1 gets you building pages that display and allow you to edit the data in a database. As you progress through the book, you will learn about the following:

❑ Designing the structure of your Web site

❑ Implementing the database

❑ Displaying and editing data

❑ Building a shopping cart

❑ Publishing your finished site

All of the tools and examples you need are on the CD-ROM provided with this book, and you can run the finished example on your own machine—or even on our Web site at www.daveandal.net/books/8079. So, what are you waiting for? Power up your machine, install Visual Web Developer, and get started building your next great Web site!