Dummies - Visual Web Developer 2005 Express For Dummies

Welcome to Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition For Dummies.

Visual Web Developer is a tool for developing dynamic, data-driven Web sites. The dynamic part refers to the fact that each page your site sends out can be tailored — on the spot and even on the fly — for whatever person happens to be viewing the page at that moment. The data-driven part stems from the fact that the information needed to create pages dynamically is stored in a Database.

Historically, creating a data-driven Web site was an enormous task, requiring countless hours of tedious programming and debugging. Visual Web Developer (VWD) changes all that — allowing you to create dynamic Web sites in a quicker, easier, and more intuitive visual mode where simple drag-and-drop replaces hours of typing code.

That’s not to say that Visual Web Developer is so easy that you can just “think” a Web site into existence. There’s still plenty of knowledge and skill required to develop a Web site. You just don’t need as much knowledge andskill as was required in the pre-VWD olden days.

If you’ve spent much time online trying to figure out how to work Visual Web Developer, you’ve probably been overwhelmed by countless buzzwords and confusing computer code that looks like something written by aliens from another planet. Much of what you’ve seen probably comes from people comparing the VWD way of doing things to the old way of doing things (and that can get obscure in a hurry).

This ebook takes a different approach: I don’t talk about the old way of doing things at all. There are two reasons for that. The first is, if you don’t know about the old way of doing things, then the comparisons don’t help one bit. And if you do know the old way of doing things, then you can see for yourself how the new way is different without my telling you.

At the risk of sounding smarmy, I might even go so far as to say that the old way of doing this is irrelevant now. By the time you’ve finished with this ebook, you’ll see what I mean. And you’ll be able to create powerful data-driven Web sites — perhaps without typing any code at all.