1046 Chapter 23 INTRODUCTION TO WEB PROGRAMMING

Summary

This chapter was an introduction to Web applications. As you saw, developing Web applications requires some knowledge of HTML and the ASP.NET objects and a good understanding of the interaction model between servers and clients. The two major obstacles in programming Web applications are the lack of state and the fact the client doesn’t support the rich controls of the Windows interface.

To maintain state during a session, you must move data between the server and the client, such as the session’s ID. ASP.NET can deal with this problem as long as you set the AutoPostBack property to True. As for the interfaces of Web applications, you can only use the controls supported by the browser, which are the HTML controls. The Web controls of ASP.NET allow you to make the most of the HTML controls.

Finally, the code that drives the Web application resides on the server and is activated every time the client submits a page to the server. The Web application reads the data on the form, processes them, and responds to the client’s request by submitting another page. This is how all Web applications work, and not just ASP.NET Web applications. Now that you know how to build functional Web applications, we can look into adding data-access capabilities in a Web application.