What distinguishes the web hobbyist from the professional developer is the ability to store and retrieve data from a server over the Internet. Some readers may have

made that step with PHP or Perl, and for them the journey has already begun. For others, ASP.NET 3.5 is just the next step in the growth and development of ASP.NET. For them, much will be familiar and some will be very new. If the transition is from ASP.NET using Visual Basic to ASP.NET with C#, then you will find even more new, and the transition to C# is going to be easier than many imagine. Still others are making the first step into the realm of server-side programming, so just about everything about ASP.NET 3.5 and C# 3.0 is new.

For those using ASP.NET for the first time, the good news is that the transition to the server side could hardly be easier. Everything in this book is set up to learn ASP.NET 3.5 and C# 3.0 using Visual Studio 2008. Using the tools built into Visual Studio 2008, you will quickly learn that most of what needs to be done can be accomplished by dragging controls into a visual editor. And with the “code behind” method, C# is added in a separate file, so when editing code, you will see a clear separation—the C# 3.0 code comes “behind” the ASP.NET 3.5 code. For the most part, though, you need only a minimum of coding skills in either ASP.NET, which feels a lot like HTML, or C#, which has many features recognizable from JavaScript. However, make no mistake about it, C# 3.0 is a full-fledged coding language with the power of any good object-oriented programming (OOP) language. Most of the C# you need is simply working with functions and subroutines called by ASP.NET events. As a result, learning C# is quite simple, and you’ll get a lot of help from Visual Studio 2008 coding tips and built-in IntelliSense. However, if you wish not to use Visual Studio 2008, all of the code for both the ASP.NET and C# is provided as well. (You can program it all using Notepad if you like!) You can find a free Express version of Visual Studio 2008 at www.microsoft.com/express/download/, and it has much of the functionality of the full-fledged version. Likewise, you will find an Express Edition of SQL Server 2005, and with them both you can learn ASP.NET 3.5 and C# 3.0 on a budget while using a powerful development tool.