Starting a project

There's good news and bad news:
The good news is, that developing a project with Visual Studio is really easy.
The bad news is that it's a new technology and there is a lot of room for things to go wrong.
The lesson to take away is: take it one step at a time and follow directions.

Please let me know immediately if you followed the instructions and you are experiencing problems.


Start Visual Studio .Net (on the lab computers it is located under Programs->Programming). You will be presented with the following screen

You will most likely not see any projects listed--just click New Project

STOP! READ!

The following step is not as trivial as it seems--unlike MSVC 6.0, the next step determines what language your project will be built in.

At this point you have a choice between C++, C# and VB. If you have ever worked with ASP or Visual Basic, VB .Net might be a good choice for you. If you are more comfortable with Java than C++, by all means use C#. I have not personally used C++ for purposes of developing Web Applications, so this pretty much falls in "on your own" category (please che ck the online samples and make sure that you understand that level of C++. I am not sure how to implement a Web application but I believe you need to create an ATL application).

Select an ASP .Net Web Application to develop an ASP project and ASP .Net Web Service for your Web Service (it is possible to have them in one project, but keep them separate for simplicity).

Location: the default location that Visual Studio suggests is under localhost. However, unless you have IIS installed on your machine, you will not be able to develop under localhost. This is the case with all Sieg lab machines (if you have a machine with IIS and want to know about alternative options, talk to me).
Under location, type http://iinetsrv/<NameOfYourProject>.
Please make sure to prefix the name of your project with your group's name as in: cse444a_BestProject
Click OK

This is it, you're ready to start coding. The window you see is very much in the style of the Visual Basic IDE, if you've ever used it (if you don't see the toolbox show on the left side of the screen, click View in the toolbar and select Toolbox).
To create and kind of control, select that control from the toolbox and drag a rectangle over the grid.

Alternatively, look at the bottom left corner of the screen--you can switch between Design and HTML views. If you would rather code the controls yourself, switch to HTML view and type away.

One last detail: Every ASP page has an aspx extension. This is done so ASP .Net pages can co-exist with ASP pages which have an asp extension. Each asp page has a corresponding code file, which has the same name as the page and extension .aspx.vb or .aspx.cs (it is usually called the code behind class).
The reason for the existence of this page is the separation of user interface from application logic. The code-behind class inherits from the Page Object, your page inherits from the code-behind class. If you're working in Visual Basic, the top line in HTML view looks something like:
<%@ Page Language="VB" Inherits="WebPage" Src="CodeBehind.vb" %>
Often , the code behind page is not visible in the Solution Explorer--just Click File->Open File and look for that file (the cs/vb extension iteself might or might not be displayed, depending on your setup--the easiest way is to find the file is to restrict the file types shown through the drop down box)

Make sure that your code behind class inherits from the Page class In VB this looks like
Public Class WebPage : Inherits Page
The code behind class is where you should implement functionality.

There is a vast amount of resources on developing web pages and web services. This page is intended to get you started with Microsoft Visual Studio .Net and IIS.
Please refer to the Resources page for a list of online resources and tutorials.