Hi, my name is Andy Olsen and welcome to the Total Training Series on building web applications using asp.net. I have been creating web applications using Microsoft technologies for more than ten years now and I have seen some pretty significant changes in that time. Before asp.net, the way that you created web applications was by using ASP or active server pages but developing web applications with ASP was just a hard work. Well, Microsoft revolutionized the world of web development when they introduced asp.net.

Although asp.net sounds a bit like ASP, really, it is an entirely different proposition altogether. For startups, asp.net is completely object oriented. You can use whichever .net language you prefer and we are going to use C sharp in this series. Also, asp.net provides an extremely rich set of web controls such as a grid view and a calendar which makes it much easier for you to create great user interfaces. And, on top of all that, asp.net applications have full access to the power of the .net framework class library.

So, I am a huge fan of asp.net. For me, it is the ideal platform for web development and I have worked for lots of other web development technologies including Java Surplus, JSP, Pearl and PHP. And, asp.net is the clear winner in my eyes. I hope you will see why during this series. So, let us get started. We will begin with a quick look back. We will see how web development has evolved from static html through asp and then to asp.net then we will see how to create a simple asp.net web application containing a few controls and we will see how to handle some of the events in our code.

We are going to be using ASP.NET Version 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 and we will write in our code in C sharp, so let us get started.