Chapter 15. Building Web Applicationswith Web Forms

Rather than writing traditional Windows desktop and client-server applications, more and more developers are now writing web-based applications, even when their software is for desktop use. There are many obvious advantages. For one, you do not have to create as much of the user interface; you can let Internet Explorer and other browsers handle a lot of it for you. Another, perhaps bigger advantage is that distribution of revisions is faster, easier, and less expensive. When I worked at an online network that predated the Web, we estimated our cost of distribution for each upgrade at $1 million per diskette (remember diskettes?). Web applications have virtually zero distribution cost. The third advantage of web applications is distributed processing. With a web-based application, it is far easier to provide server-side processing. The Web provides standardized protocols (e.g., HTTP, HTML, and XML) to facilitate building n-tier applications.

The .NET technology for building web applications (and dynamic web sites) is ASP.NET, which provides a rich collection of types for building web applications in its System.Web and System.Web.UI namespaces. In this chapter, the focus is on where ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET programming intersect: the creation of Web Forms.

This can be only a brief introduction to Web Forms. For complete coverage of this rich and powerful technology, please see Programming ASP.NET, by Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz (O'Reilly).

Web Forms bring Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques (such as those used in Windows Forms) to the development of web applications. As with Windows Forms, you can drag and drop controls onto a form and write the supporting code either inline or in code-behind pages. With Web Forms, however, the application is deployed to a web server, and users interact with the application through a standard browser.