Chapter 15. Programming Web Forms and Web Services

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 Netscape Navigator 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. There is a great deal to learn about ASP.NET, but much of it is language-independent. ASP.NET offers a rich suite of controls and related tools, including tools to validate data, display dates, present advertisements, interact with users, and so forth. Most of these require no coding whatsoever.

The focus of this chapter is where ASP.NET and C# programming intersect: the creation of Web Forms and Web Services. The role of the C# programmer in ASP.NET development is in writing the event handlers that respond to user interaction. Many of the event handlers will either add data to a database or retrieve data and make it available to the controls. For coverage of ASP.NET alone, see my book (co-written with Dan Hurwitz), Programming ASP.NET (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, 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.

.NET Web Services expand on the concept of distributed processing to build components whose methods can be invoked across the Internet. These components can be built in any .NET language, and they communicate using open protocols that are platform-independent. For example, a stock exchange server might provide a web service method that takes a stock ticker symbol as a parameter and returns a quote. An application might combine that service with another service from a different company that also takes a stock symbol but that returns background data about the company. The application developer can concentrate on adding value to these services, rather than duplicating the same service for his own application.

The current chapter demonstrates Web Forms and Web Services programming using C#.